We've been preparing to release version 1.0 of our game Onslaught! and part of that process has included looking wherever we can for feedback on how to improve the game.

Luckily for us, Onslaught! has been talked about a little bit on the 'net (especially on /r/WebGames; thanks Reddit!) so we've been able to dig through some players' comments. And we've noticed two recurring themes:

It's too easy

• "lol it was easy just spam the space bar with the 3 way swords shooting at every door"
• "It would be nice is the difficulty actually ramped up past a certain point"
• "I don't want to die on purpose"
• "272,460 I'm so bored....."

It's too hard

• "Too hard, I think"
• "I officially suck at this game."
• "I died when they started spawning two cyclops at a time :("
• "That game was fucking hard."

So, it's too easy AND too hard?

If the feedback was consistently that Onslaught! was too easy, here are some easy tweaks we could have made to help make the game more difficult:

• Increase the number of enemies.
• Increase enemy speed.
• Increase enemy damage.
• Decrease the hero's damage.
• Decrease the hero's health.
• Decrease weapon drops.

Likewise, we could have reversed any of those rules to make the game easier. But what is a game designer supposed to do with conflicting requirements?

The difficulty curve

The current version of Onslaught! has a very simple algorithm for increasing difficulty. There are seven waves, the final wave consisting primarily of the dragon boss. After defeating this wave, the player is thrown back to the beginning of the loop with the number of enemies increased steadily by 50% of the first wave (so it would go: 10 bats, 15 bats, 20 bats, 25 bats, etc.).

According to Google Analytics, Onslaught!'s 10,000+ players have played the game for an average of 32 seconds each. We mentioned previously how we had failed to make a 30 second game, and for the final release of Onslaught! we decided it would be good to expand on that idea.

What we were wanting instead of a steady climb in difficulty like this was an easy beginning with a sharp increase in difficulty. So after the first couple of wave cycles, the game should rapidly increase in difficulty, providing a challenge for hardcore gamers.

The below graph shows the previous difficulty curve (v0.2, in blue), and the difficulty curve we are shooting for in v1.0 (in red):

What we're going to do and why

This is going to be a difficult (but fun!) problem to solve. Here's what we have in mind:

• We're adding four new enemies: flaming skull, flying imps, wizards and sandworms (each with new behavior). These enemies will increase the length of gameplay (giving us room to play with difficulty) as well as mixing up the player's strategy with varying enemy behaviors.
• Players will battle two new classic D&D-style bosses (guess what they are!). The first will be relatively easy and the second will be extremely difficult.
• After completing a cycle of waves, traps will begin to appear in the arena! The number of traps will steadily increase as the player completes cycles. They do damage to the player when touched, so this will limit the area the player can navigate.
• Complete weapon overhaul: this includes balancing current weapons as well as adding new weapons (such as a bouncing battle axe and flaming sword that leaves a trail of fire in its wake)!
• For the Freeplay awards, we did two things to improve the 30 second experience: we replaced the default weapon (rocks, which are boring) with swords (which are more fun!) and we provided the player with two starting weapons. These weapons were randomly generated, so players were able to reload the game in order to get whatever weapons they wanted (for instance, the overpowered trident). For v1.0, we're going to provide set weapons to balance this out (probably knives and fireballs).

We've got these improvements and many others in mind as well! Our hope is that these gameplay tweaks and content additions will make the game more enjoyable for both casual and hardcore players alike. What do you think? Is Onslaught! currently too easy or too hard?

My vicious cycle

Something had to give. I'd been trying and failing to make my game idea a reality for years and years. The vision was simple: an online, multiplayer retro RPG. I guess the term would have been MMORPG but I'd been working on various implementations of this project long before the days of World of Warcraft.

I remember being a kid and longing to play games in the time of Shining Force and Secret of Mana. I had that same longing, but this time it was to make my own game.

Eventually I started referring to my game project as Valadria. Sure, I'd go off on tangents and I'd sometimes work on other little crappy games, but I'd always come back to this core retro RPG concept.

My last iteration of Valadria is up on App Engine. It's a very early prototype, but it's playable. I've also put the source on GitHub (something I wish I'd been able to do with each of my iterations over the years).

So I had a pretty good idea about the game I wanted to build, but I'd been working on it for years with very little to show for it. Here was my vicious cycle:

1. For some unexplainable reason, my dream game would pop into my head, and I'd get motivated.
2. I'd scrounge up freetime between work, school, social life and gaming, and I'd put whatever knowledge I had together towards making the game.
3. Eventually (and this was inevitable), I'd hit a hurdle and stop working. Graphics, music, networking code, whatever. Something would kill my motivation, most often the hopeless feeling of knowing I'd never finish what I'd started. This step felt like getting fired or dumped; it was heartbreaking.
4. Rinse, repeat.

And it should be noted that every time I went through the first step, I'd start from scratch. It had been months or years since the last iteration, so the code was gross and the ideas were stale. I had been repeating this process for over 10 years.

It can take time to learn, especially when you're so close to something that you become blind to it. I didn't notice this cycle. I just thought I liked making games in my free time. What's wrong with that? But it wasn't that simple and it wasn't that harmless. I was suffering from a repeated, defeating, soul-crushing feeling of hopelessness every few years when I'd get fed up without getting anywhere and shelve my dream game. It was making me depressed and negatively affecting other areas of my life. And when I finally realized this, I took action to prevent it.

My prevention plan

How was I going to stop this vicious cycle? I had recently read Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard which inspired me to fix areas of my life that felt broken. And so the next time I was motivated to work on Valadria, I instead focused my attention on examining why the project always failed and what to do about it.

After much internal debating, whiteboarding and sleepless nights, here was my plan:

1. Create a JavaScript game engine and use it to build a simple match-3 game.
2. Extend this same engine and create a Puzzle Quest clone.
3. Extend this new engine to build my dream game, an online retro RPG.

This list probably looks really unexpected for an amateur indie developer who wants to work on retro RPGs. So let me explain my line of thinking …

Why a match-3 game in JavaScript?

Over the years, I had tried to build Valadria in everything from QBASIC to C++ to Turbo Pascal. When I was 23, I started working as a PHP programmer, which got me looking more seriously at Flash and JavaScript.

Flash was pretty cool (ActionScript 3 is particularly wonderful) but I was learning the most about JavaScript and I felt the most comfortable with it. So after a few more failures and still feeling pulled to JavaScript, I just said "fuck it" and decided to use it, even though it had never really been tested as a true gaming language.

And I know what you may have thought: "Just what the world needs: another match-3 game." I feel the same way, I do; I'll explain in the next section.

What? A Puzzle Quest clone?!

You may notice I used the term clone here, though I am embarrassed to admit it. As an amateur indie game developer, I feel that clones are wrong in so many ways. They lack innovation, they are sleazy and unethical, and they are at their core lazy game design. Borrowing design elements is just another part of making great software, but one should not borrow too heavily.

So how did I arrive at the conclusion that I should work on a Puzzle Quest clone?

My desire was to make a pretty massive retro RPG. I had to, for some reason. But I thought about it, and I had never even made "real" game of any kind. Not even a Tetris clone or a side-scrolling platformer. I was untested as a game developer and so my aspirations were unreachable.

Enter Puzzle Quest. I was a huge fan of the original and, like many others, was very disappointed with the next Puzzle Quest game.

I really wanted to play an online version of PQ with my friends, but the developer of the original did not choose to go that route. Plus, I knew I couldn't get motivated to work on something like ZooKeeper; I'm just too much of a medieval fantasy geek to get excited about much else. But I could get behind something like Puzzle Quest, so I came up with what I called Puzzle Punk: a game similar to Puzzle Quest in a steampunk world with online multiplayer capabilities.

But even this game was far too complicated. I was an untested game developer, after all, and had never shipped a single finished game. So the plan was to first make a match-3 game. That would be my baby step. I'd make a solid, stable match-3 game and then use that core framework to build Puzzle Punk.

Connecting the pieces

I wasn't really happy with my plan but at least I finally had one.

My end goal was not to make Puzzle Punk. That was not the desire that was keeping me up all night and defeating me every year or so. Indeed, I beat myself up a lot over the last few months for having such a stupid idea as a clone in the first place. I'd second guess my plan and consider scratching it, but then I'd remember how I arrived at this plan, and the soul-crushing defeat was pending again, so I just got back on track for finishing Bombada. I wasn't really happy with my plan but at least I finally had one.

So what happened?

This plan failed. But that's ok. I actually did finish the match-3 game; it's called Bombada. It's playable in your browser right now and I put the source code up on GitHub. So I finished one step out of three.

And as you can see from the many images of the game's development sprinkled about, I did make some progress on Puzzle Punk (step 2).

The reason I shelved development on Puzzle Punk is because I started working with Geoff. We had met some time before and had mutual friends but never seriously talked about collaborating. He had some of his own ideas and his own engine he was working on, and all that stuff sounded way more fun than what I was doing. I guess if we had not decided to work together (or never met), it's conceivable that I could still be working on Puzzle Punk, but I doubt it.

I guess the reason I think that is because I didn't even attempt to try to get Geoff on board for my Puzzle Punk idea. I wanted to be working on something else.

What was good

It wasn't all bad: I learned some extremely valuable lessons from all this.

• Having a plan at all made me feel in control and empowered me, adding to my motivation at a time when I otherwise felt powerless. Plans can go to shit over time but it's important to have one anyway.
• Having a small project to work on first (Bombada, the match-3 game) also helped to remove my feeling of hopelessness. When thinking about how far I had to go in the long run, it was overwhelming. But it was easy to make progress on Bombada, and it was very rewarding.
• Keeping really great records of my progress helped drive development. If I would ever feel like I wasn't gaining enough ground, I could dig through my git history and be reminded of what I had accomplished.

What was bad

• I think I was on the right track using a language I know and love like JavaScript, but I should have used a technology like canvas that makes more sense for game development (as opposed to DOM). Hearing Geoff talk about cool canvas stuff (which is so much better suited for games) got me really excited; I could have used some of that motivation.
• Instead of a match-3 game, I should have been working on a ridiculously simple medieval fantasy game. This would have held my attention better and kept me motivated. Cliffski of Positech Games has written about this kind of thing.
• Instead of building Puzzle Punk, I should have been building a slightly more complicated version of the previously mentioned simple game. Then I should have iterated on that, and continued the process.

Overall, I guess this plan was as good as any other. Clearly something needed to change because what I was trying was just not working. It's hard to say if the plan would have worked overall, but my single biggest takeaway from all of this is: if you find you can't do it alone, it can really help to collaborate.

Case in point: after working just a few months together, Geoff and I have put together what we think is a cool little game. And this is a great building block towards building bigger games.

Google Docs

I have no idea if this will be interesting to anyone or not, but in addition to uploading the mocks and wireframes to Flickr, I've also opened up the game documentation I was working on. You can view the files below on Google Docs:

• Puzzle Punk Economy
• Puzzle Punk Gameplay

Do you have any failed game projects? I can't be the only one! I'd love to read about someone else's failed project as well.

Good news for chiptunes fans! Composer Joshua Morse has put up the Onslaught! original soundtrack on his YouTube profile! Check it out below.

Here They Come

Man vs. Dragon

Here are direct links to the songs:

• Here They Come
• Man vs. Dragon

What do you think? Do you love them as much as we do??

How do you find out about these things?

I hear about game development contests relatively often, but it's almost always too late to enter. I end up just being frustrated and wonder: "Where do people find out about these contests?"

We've recently been more fortunate and have been able to successfully enter two contests. And here's how we finally were able to find out about them in time: by subscribing to insane amount of gaming news. Below is a list of game development related news sites, feeds and other resources.

News sites:

• Gamasutra • News RSS
• GameDev.net • RSS
• Global Game Jam • RSS
• Independent Games Festival • News RSS
• reddit IndieGaming • RSS
• TIGSource • RSS

Indie-related Twitter profiles:

• Andrew Wooldridge - random game news and web development links from a professional web developer.
• IndieDB - News, insight and media direct from the developers.
• IndieGames.com - The latest independent games news, interviews, and features, from the makers of Gamasutra.
• Jacob Seidelin - Ridiculously good JavaScript hacker and creator of javascriptgaming.com.
• Make Games - A collection of interesting games and game design related links. High content, no noise. (From a current Twitter employee and previous co-worker of mine, Kevin Cheng)
• Wolfire - An independent game company (they blog almost every single day, yowza).
• Of course there's also our Twitter profile where we tweet about our own doings and game-related news.

Do you know of any additional resources for game development contest news? Please let me know in the comments and I'll happily add them to the list.

So now that you know about these contests coming up …

How do you know if you should enter?

So you found out about an upcoming contest and you're interested. Should you try to put a game together to enter into the contest? This is a difficult question. First: is it a good fit?

If the contest requires that your game is built on Unity but all of your experience is with pygame, that's probably a good sign to forget about the contest and get back to whatever else you were doing.

It could be that the contest is so amazing that it's worth derailing your current project, starting a new one, or learning a new language, but I'd seriously advise against that. I think it's a good adage to finish what you've started and play to your strengths. You might be able to enter a contest outside of your skill set, but you'd probably make a better game just for yourself for fun. So I guess what you should ask yourself is:

Will you benefit from entering?

On the surface, this is another way of asking, Could you win? The benefit of winning many of these contests is clear: for example, with the recently-announced Activision contest, the grand prize is something like $100k and a publishing deal. That's pretty major! But keep in mind that with a prize like that, you're going to get some very polished entries by some veteran game developers. The competition will be intense.

So, maybe you can win and maybe you can't; other benefits can arise from entering. For example, if you read our postmortem on the Boing Boing contest, you saw that we were driven by the hard, unchangeable deadline, which was great because we often can't find motivation. We also made a bunch of mistakes and learned from them, which is another beneficial side effect.

Merely being involved in a contest can also get some much desired attention to your game. According to Google Analytics, Boing Boing has referred over 1,500 people to our game Onslaught!. That's not much from a big business perspective, but for a tiny and unknown team like ours, it's great!

Determining if a contest or promotion is shady

So you found a contest, you figured it's worth your time for one reason or another, and now you're in! You want to enter. Just please do one more quick thing first: make sure the contest isn't shady. You can do that by reading the fine print and getting a second opinion.

If you're seriously considering entering, it's probably worth your time to read the fine print. It's certainly not fun reading, but you could get into a bind otherwise: a single sentence could disqualify your game or remove your rights to your intellectual property. Fortunately, there are resources out there to help you.

The guys over at Wolfire often write about the bigger contests (like they recently did). For that particular contest, you can also get insight from Tom Buscaglia: The Game Attorney (a real attorney!).

Now, if you can't find the fine print, that's a bad sign right there. A legitimate company running a "real" contest is going to have documentation to cover their asses. If you're just entering into a quick weekend contest like the fine folks over at Game Jolt regularly hold, that's fine. But if there's supposedly a cash prize, and you're going to expend hard-earned time and/or money on your project, it had damned well better be legit.

When in doubt, why not ask your indie game development peers? Late last year I bumped into an interesting thread with the subject Indie Game Competition - $15k and possible publishing deals!. What was interesting to me was a post that said:

And you still owe me over $250,000. I also found out I am not the only developer being scammed by Zoo Games, so this should be a warning to everyone here.

I'm not going to pretend to know what's going on there, but it doesn't smell right, know what I mean? For that reason, I'd have passed on that contest.

Decide quickly and move on with your development

The most important thing is not to be affected by decision paralysis. In the past I've spent an embarassing amount of time just thinking about these sort of contests. And in the end I never entered, so all I had to show for it was a ton of lost time. Think about it this way: you're probably going to keep making games either way, aren't you? So set aside a little time to determine if it's worth your while, then move on and get back to making games!

Have I missed any important steps? Have you had any luck (good or bad) with these contests? Hope to hear from you in the comments.

Whenever I have free time to work on game development, I always struggle to concentrate on the game development itself. Sometimes I lose this struggle and I work on something peripheral like logo design. That happened recently, and here's what came out of it:

For some reason I kept picturing the name engraved in gold. And I was thinking it would be cool for the logo to look like a ye olde tavern sign, like an "INN" sign in classic RPGs.

I didn't spend much time on this beore I realized I was going in the wrong direction. It looks more like a piece of ugly jewelry glued to a sign hanging by thick string.

And here's a different approach: an abandoned playground. I definitely dig the style (I swear some movie company had an animated logo that had a similar look and it was really cool. Anybody know what that is?) and I like how it plays on the company name. But overall it made me more sad than motivated. Maybe … maybe I am just too sensitive …

I was actually really pleased with how this concept turned out. The hourglass represents the idea from the company name about lost time, and the sand falling on the dragon represents the medieval fantasy game we've been wanting to make. The main problem is: how do you make a logo out of that? If a logo is rectangular, it's usually horizontal. We could cut out the top portion but then it looks odd, with the glass stopping at the edge of the image.

Plus, the idea of a sundial came up, and that sounded really cool for some reason …

This was my first shot at the sundial concept. I modeled it after an actual sundial we had in our yard while growing up. It looks very similar except there was a character where the title is (I think it was the Grim Reaper). The idea of making the center piece (the part that casts a shadow to tell the time) a sword came late in the design, which I felt made the whole thing come together.

This is a deeper dive into the initial sundial concept. Copper replaced iron because it strikes me as a very medieval-fantasy type of metal (probably because it was the first decent weapon to buy in Dragon Warrior). Then some texture was added to the face, the hilt of the sword got more design attention, and the title was enlarged.

Overall I think we were pretty happy with it, but we collaborated on an idea to have a stone sundial, where the center piece is actually an axe that was just slammed into the sundial whoooaaaaaa! We thought this was awesomely metal so …

Here it is! We're really happy with it and we hope it conveys "young company that makes medieval fantasy games for you to enjoy," because that was our goal.

The "Lost Decade Games" text itself hasn't seen much design attention yet; I think that's something that we'll iterate on. But in the meantime, now we have an image to attach to our various online accounts, which should satisfy our OCD for now.

Oh boy bonus! I admit there are some designs we're not showing here because they're embarrassingly bad. Here's an example: I was exploring the idea of using the name of the company in the design itself, and I formed the words into the shape of a sword.

It was a decent idea in my head, but in Photoshop it looked so bad I thought it deserved a turd for a handle.

Oh, we also recently added a developer page on Mod DB (and Indie DB, though I don't understand the difference) which had ridiculous logo requirements like image resolutions at: 940x360, 950x150 and 1024x768. Isn't that odd? Anyway you can see more (huge!) versions of the final logo there.

Have you worked on a logo before? What problems did you have and what worked well? Or better yet, have you blogged about it like the Wolfire guys?

Edit 8/7/2010: Fixed some typos, added some links.

There are a lot of game development contests out there, and for the longest time it's felt like we kept missing them. So when we heard about Boing Boing's Music Inspired by Games contest, we decided to derail our current game project a bit and dive in. Here's our postmortem on how that went.

The Game We Built

First things first, we built a game called Onslaught! which can be played in a canvas-enabled browser.

What Worked Well

• We are ambitious people but we did a surprisingly good job of finishing the damn thing by pushing back on features. There were excellent ideas such as 4 playable classes and multiple stages with different music, but none of it seemed feasible in the 2-3 weeks of time that we had. So that feels like the one thing that we did really well.
• GitHub and Dropbox worked out very well for organization and collaboration. These are such fantastic sharing services that you can use right now for free.
• We had a good, concrete definition of our game that we could refer to often when wondering which features to include. Our mantra was "a medieval fantasy Smash-TV", which helped the direction we went immensely.

What Didn't Work So Well

• Our Google App Engine account wasn't billing-enabled, so our game page went down almost immediately after the contest began. And that's a mistake that Matt should have learned from having "launched" Bombada just recently. Lesson learned now, twice!
• We also did not include Google Analytics. We figured App Engine had some kind of analytics-like service for free, but nope. Google Analytics is easy to setup and can provide invaluable feedback, and we hadn't installed it until recently, so we fucked up.
• We didn't make it clear that flash was required for audio. We received many comments about audio not working. Blocking flash is common, especially for savvy Internet users. And for this contest especially, music was integral. Not letting the players know that was a mistake.
• Should have made the keyboard controls easier to discover. We did include some text on the title page of how to play, but it wasn't enough; many people said they couldn't figure out how to move or fire.
• We should have been more clear in our email to Boing Boing that this was a game by Lost Decade Games. On the arcade page, it says "Matt Hackett's Onslaught!" which isn't fair because Geoff did the lion's share of the code. We were pleased to see a direct link to Joshua Morse's personal website, which we think everyone should check out because his music is so incredible.
• We did not build a game that would thrive in the 30 second experience domain. Here's what we mean: with 9 entries, people only have a minute or two at max of patience for each game. Our game was challenging immediately: you're fighting off goblins and bats with rocks. That's not fun. We feel that our game can get pretty compelling for fans of the genre eventually, but only after 2-3 minutes, once you've collected better weapons and are fighting cooler enemies like cyclops or a dragon.

  The 30 second experience is especially important in a contest which is based on users votes rather than of a panel of judges. Random visitors aren't going to give your game a fair shot if you don't hook them within the first 30 seconds.

  For those interested, we believe we have created a better 30 second experience by removing rocks in favor of swords, providing two weapons to start with, and getting into the action quicker (goblins instead of bats in the first wave). It's now more fun to play immediately, which is great for anyone who plays.

  Don't take our word for it, though. Play it yourself and leave your feedback here on the blog or in our forums.

• The URL is forever. We submitted our entry at http://lostdecadegamesapp.appspot.com/, which we intended to use for other things as well. But the game itself is in the root directory, and we've noticed that some good folks out there have embedded Onslaught! as an iframe, which is great, but now if we ever change that page we're going to be providing broken experiences for potential players and pissing some people off. That won't do! So the URL is permanent and we can never have anything there but a playable version of Onslaught!. Lesson learned.

Conclusion

We made some mistakes and learned some valuable lessons. And now we have something that we can (and have!) submitted to other contests. And the great thing is that, for the Free Play contest, we were able to spend most of our time tweaking gameplay for fun factor instead of building from scratch.

Also, having a hard deadline that you cannot push back can be very good for productivity. All in all, it was a great experience and we highly recommending entering a contest if you happen to come across one.

Links!

• Play the version of Onslaught! that we entered in the Boing Boing contest.
• Play the latest version of Onslaught!.
• Play all 9 contest entries.

We've been hard at work the last several weeks improving Onslaught! after entering in the Boing Boing contest (Post-mortem coming soon!).

Now we're entering Onslaught! in the Freeplay Awards with bunches of bug fixes and gameplay enhancements such as:

• Brief invincibility when you get hit
• Improved the "30 second experience" by giving the player two weapons to start
• You can now cycle through your weapons with Z and X
• Cyclops now throw rocks or energy balls
• Improved the "waves" flow with gates opening/close
• You can now pause the game by pressing P
• Various behind-the-curtains improvements and bug fixes
• Pain and death animations
• Demoblin now gets near you and throws tridents
• New title
• Tweaked the hell out of gameplay
• Added dragon boss!
• Hit point bars for dragon and superclops
• Got rid of rocks in favor of swords
• How to play screen

Sounds great, right?

Play Onslaught! v0.2! 

As always, we love feedback so leave us some comments here on the blog or in our forums.

(Matt scored around 500k the other night during testing, please take him down a notch and post screenshots of your higher scores!)

Our game, Onslaught!, has been selected as a finalist in Boing Boing's "Games Inspired by Music" competition!

Check out our entry along with the others and please vote for Onslaught! (Voting is handled at the bottom of this page.)

If you don't care for all this contest nonsense you can just play the game! We'd love to hear your feedback on the game so don't hesitate to leave comments on this post!

Today I'm happy to announce Diggy, an open source game engine written in JavaScript. Embedded below is Bombada, a game made with Diggy:

(Works best in Chrome or Safari.)

More about Diggy:

The name "Diggy" came from DGE, which stands for DHTML Game Engine. It's a relatively full-featured game engine meant to empower developers to rapidly produce browser-based games.

You've already seen what Diggy can do, so here's what it is not:

• A DOM selector.
• An event manager.
• A canvas or SVG library.
• Useful for standard web apps.
• Meant to do anything but make DOM games.
• Very stable or ready to make enterprise games.
• Still in development (at least by me).

(There are also known issues to be aware of.)

More about Bombada:

As you may have read previously, I'm an amateur game developer. I've never shipped a "real" game and Bombada is a baby step towards fixing that. Here's more about the project:

• Bombada was orginally intended as an iPhone game (hence the 480x320 resolution).
• Bombada was also intended to work with node (hence match3.js being a separate file and attaching to the exports object).
• 99% of the code was written from scratch by me, with some exceptions being the easing library (borrowed from the YUI2 library) and the JSON parser.
• I also made the graphics, which are free to use but have some Creative Commons restrictions.
• The music and sound effects were made by Joshua Morse, a freelance music composer. Hire him, he's fantastic.

Bombada ended up taking about 7 months of part-time development.

Bombada ended up taking about 7 months of part-time development. But it's not that complex, so why did it take so long? Partly because as a fulltime web developer, I don't have a lot of free time. But also partly because I was building Diggy along with it, so in theory any future games could be built much more rapidly.

I love postmortems, so I may write one up eventually comprised of what worked, what failed, and any valuable lessons learned. If that's something that would interest you, please let me know in the comments.

Those links again please?

• Diggy game engine source code on GitHub.
• Bombada puzzle game source code on GitHub.
• Play Bombada in its own window.

Edit 7/6/2010: Bombada composer Joshua Morse has put his excellent original soundtrack on sale over at Bandcamp. It's a steal at just $3 (or more if you're feeling generous).

I grew up playing games like the original Dragon Warrior (NES). And from the moment a friend taught me PRINT "hello world" in QBASIC, I've been trying to develop my own RPG.

It started out as just a hobby, one that for whatever reason would often consume my entire life weeks at a time. Fast forward about 17 years and the passion is as strong as ever. The sad thing is I've just never been able to make it happen. Why haven't I ever shipped my beloved RPG?

I've been writing software and shipping products professionally for almost 7 years now, so I know I'm capable of finishing a basic game. After much pondering, I think I've figured out the two main reasons I've failed for so long:

The pie in the sky

You want it to be spectacular because, after all, it's your dream game!

When you think about your dream game, your head's in the clouds. You think about all the cool features you would make and all the problems other games have that yours wouldn't. You want it to be spectacular because, after all, it's your dream game! But the problem is it's just too much. As an amateur developer, I'd have been better off thinking up the next Tetris or Bejeweled, because a one-man-army could make the next one of those, but not the next WoW. The good news is that the solution is easy: build a small, concise game.

Loss of motivation

The passion persists, but the motivation is fleeting. I would get into these little boosts of energy where I'd remember "Oh yeah! I should make that RPG I've always wanted to! I'm pretty good with JavaScript now, I could do it!" And I get revved up and spend the next month rewriting the crappy engine I had from last time around, then like clockwork, the spark dies. What causes the loss of motivation? A few things:

• Working in a vacuum makes it feel like nobody cares about your project, and as humans, it's easy to think "well then why should I care?" and quit. The key here is to collaborate and spread the word about your project.
• Missing assets like graphics and music can really kill your spirit. You're thinking about all the different problems you have to solve like tilemaps, scrolling, inventory management ... then you remember you need an entire game's worth of graphics, music and sound effects to boot. Game over! (Luckily these days a clever Googler can find free graphics and amazing musicians. But most importantly, it's not that big of a problem, so figure it out and move on.
• Distracting side projects come up. I've been hacking on various things like fancy new versions of my website since I was about 12. But the only project that I really feel like I let slip through my fingers over the years is my own RPG. So clearly, I've been spending my time on the wrong things.

That said, it hasn't been all bad. I made a crappy little retro shooter called Spacius!, and before Geoff and I started working on our game together, I was working on a medieval fantasy RPG I call Valadria. It was going well, probably better than it had in years. I put up a playable demo on Google's App Engine (which I really recommend trying out). So some progress is there, it just hasn't been enough.

Summary: how to avoid these problems

I'm only going to spend my time on tasks that will get me closer to achieving my goal, which is to ship a professional RPG. There are tons of other cool projects out there, but this is the one for me. I'm also going to collaborate and try to get the attention of people who like playing (or building) the kind of games I want to make.

Do you have a project you've always wanted to complete your whole life? If so, what are you going to do to make it a reality?