Ludum Dare finished last monday and I made it! I finished a solid game in 48 hours with pretty graphics. It has been a very exciting week with lots of positive feedback. You can play the game here:
You finally came up with the game of your dreams. You wrote everything down, used all available studies and it sounds too good to be true on paper. But how do you make sure it ends up being fun to play? You could build the game and throw in endless testing afterwards until your test subjects think it’s fun. But is that really the way to go? I think not. There are better ways to do quality checks. So what easier and quicker ways are there?
Creating an artistic game is one part. Making a game popular for an audience is another. My company creates games for businesses, a different kind of audience than Ludum Dare participants. How to make sure that a game will fit them? The key is to know your target audience to the bone, to make sure they keep playing and recommend it to friends. Our goal is to make lots of people play and enjoy our games. So, what does motivate a human to enjoy my games?
Although there are millions of games these days, only a few really succeed and even less are worth to play. How is this possible? A game consists of a set of rules, right? But a bunch of rules don’t make it fun to play. Actually, far from in my opinion. Throwing in some random rules doesn’t make a game good. So, which aspects are important related to the rules and make it worth the play? What gives rules the edge to play a game again and again?
We all know games, everyone plays games, but do we really know what defines a game? Before we can create a good game we need some sort of definition of it. So what is it? Sure, everything with rules can be defined as a sort of game. But let’s define it a bit better than that. So let’s try!
During this seventh Ludum Dare competition our theme was Connected Worlds. I started around 05:30 CEST on Saturday and submitted it around 03:00 on Monday. I worked thirty-six hours on the game, slept ten hours (2 + 8), used three hours for writing down a concept, drew sixteen hours, used around eight hours for creating the game’s logic and six hours for music. The other time was used for play testing, blogging, eating and quick breaks.
So, what is my secret? Or how did he do it? Well, Read on. This log tells about how I designed and created my 48 hour game and what choices I made.