next »

[Ajene]

Well i am dropping my RPG due to school getitng in the way and being too time consuming to make the type of rpg i wanna make, I still plan to keep writing the design doc so when i go back to it All i need to do is make the maps and scripts. (we're using RPG XP and our own self-made graphics) But what i wanna keep doing is working on a game, i'm gonna use BASIC to program em. And i'm wonder what genre of game is smaller then a RPG and wont take up alot of my time? i'm kinda in a rut.

[Cray]

An RPG could still be small if you don't get carried away in details... ie: all self-made graphics. People used to make 20 minute no-battle games in under an hour often with Rpg Maker XP, just gotta work on your productivity. Short "game in an hour/day" type compos are great for practice

But the best genre you can do if you really want to make a game is anything you'd enjoy. Anything can be small or big if you let them get that way

[JasonPickering]

i agree with cray, a small rpg could still be done. Set a small goal like escape from the castle or return the Mean Girls DVD that you borrowed from an evil witch. I think giving yourself mini challenges could help to speed you up.

on another note. check out older games, mostly for NES, Genesis and arcade. there are some uber simple games in there, and perhaps creating a game in a similar vein might help. look at burger time as an example. one room, simplistic animations, a few enemies. these are pretty simple games that most people should be able to make. these also allow you to play around with the whole game idea. what if burger time had been made with photos instead of pixel sprites. or what if the player controlled the egg, that chases the chef.

one thing i was doing was picking somehting and then running with it. like say you wish you were better at AI. well make some test AI and see where it takes you. most of the objectives from super mario 64 were made after the inital test demo, when they saw how much fun it was to do stuff like crazy wall jumps.

[Ajene]

hmm, well i guess making some small games in rpg xp can help me learn alot more. But i really wanna go to something different rather then rpgs. I'll probably do a couple of mini projects in rpg xp though, Any other ideas? maybe something that could take a week to make? and that involved me also working on coding instead of my graphic skill?

[null & void]

Try a 2D puzzle game with a mechanic no one else has done. You can make it small and it'll last for ages.

[David Pittman]

Shmups are good miniprojects. The fundamentals can easily be done in a week if you've got any sort of framework (graphics, input, and collision tests, mainly) to start from.

You could also implement a smaller part of a whole game as a miniproject. I once wrote a tile-based A* pathfinder in about and week and then developed it over the following week into a little stealth game where you had to sneak past a guard in a maze to steal treasure.

Physics demos are good, too. Make a sandbox where you can connect point masses with springs. The math isn't too difficult and it's a lot of fun to build spongy shapes and bounce them around the screen.