{"id":187,"date":"2015-01-26T20:46:25","date_gmt":"2015-01-27T04:46:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/burnhamup.com\/blog\/?p=187"},"modified":"2015-01-26T20:46:25","modified_gmt":"2015-01-27T04:46:25","slug":"make-a-game-in-a-month","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/burnhamup.com\/blog\/2015\/01\/make-a-game-in-a-month\/","title":{"rendered":"Make a game in a month"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m an avid watcher of Extra Credits. I&#8217;m not really interested in working in the video game industry, but I find discussions of games and mechanics fascinating. Their recent video encouraged budding game developers to focus on finishing games and to pick projects that they can start and finish within a month. Otherwise you either take on a project that greatly outclasses your skills; you&#8217;ll end up getting stuck and never get any experience with actually finishing a game.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/dHMNeNapL1E\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>I agreed that it was pretty good advice and move on. Later that week I watched a video of someone playing parts of the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time blindfolded. I was partly impressed but a lot of the techniques come down to creating paths that are simple enough to memorize and find while blindfolded. I was kind of hoping that you might be able to figure things out without ever having seen the game.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/JhPA_TpkzkA\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>I started thinking about what a game might look like that was meant to be played blindfolded. I realized that this game would probably fit the scope of something that I could do within a month. So on Saturday I started.<\/p>\n<p>My plan is simple. The game will be a randomly generated maze that you&#8217;ll have to navigate while trying to remember the layout. It will be designed to be played with a controller and you will only have sound and vibration to figure out where you are. It will probably involve searching the maze for a number of switches in order to open a door in the main chamber. I think this is something I&#8217;ll be able to accomplish. It will be challenging because the game will need strong stereo sound design in order to be able to hear your way around, which I&#8217;ll have to learn to do as I go along.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_188\" style=\"width: 330px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><a href=\"http:\/\/burnhamup.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/concept_art.jpg\"><img aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-188\" decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-188 size-full\" src=\"http:\/\/burnhamup.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/concept_art.jpg\" alt=\"concept_art\" width=\"320\" height=\"240\" srcset=\"https:\/\/burnhamup.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/concept_art.jpg 320w, https:\/\/burnhamup.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/concept_art-300x225.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 320px) 100vw, 320px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-188\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Concept Art<\/p><\/div>\n<p>I doubt the game will turn out to be that fun, but I&#8217;m interested in the challenge of starting and finishing the game.\u00a0You can see the code for <a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/burnhamup\/blind\/tree\/develop\">Blind on GitHub <\/a>right now. So far I have some simple walls and a controllable character. I&#8217;ve got a character that can be moved via the keyboard or a plugged in controller. The plugged in controller will vibrate when the character hits a wall. There are graphics right now, because I&#8217;d like to be able to see things to test them. I&#8217;m writing this in Python because I&#8217;m working the most in Python right now, and I&#8217;ve done some work in PyGame. I didn&#8217;t think this would be a performance intensive game, and I figured it would be faster than figuring out a Java or C++ library that I hadn&#8217;t worked with before. I also determined that I could get controller input and do a controller vibration pretty quickly.<\/p>\n<p>So far I&#8217;ve only spent three or four hours on this, but I&#8217;ve got a lot of the fundamentals working. From here I want to get a random maze generator, the switches, and a victory condition. And then I anticipate spending the last two weeks playing with sound to see if I can actually make this thing work.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m an avid watcher of Extra Credits. I&#8217;m not really interested in working in the video game industry, but I find discussions of games and mechanics fascinating. Their recent video encouraged budding game developers to focus on finishing games and &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/burnhamup.com\/blog\/2015\/01\/make-a-game-in-a-month\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/burnhamup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/burnhamup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/burnhamup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/burnhamup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/burnhamup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=187"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/burnhamup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":190,"href":"https:\/\/burnhamup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187\/revisions\/190"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/burnhamup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/burnhamup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/burnhamup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}