Game a Week 2023

This year, I decided to challenge myself by setting a goal to complete a new game every week. By the end, I hope that I am an more experienced game designer, who will have an improved intuition for fun gameplay and a faster ideation-to-finished-prototype cycle. Above all, I hope to brag some day that I made 100 games.

Atom Driver

For Ludum Dare 53, I created a game with two friends about a delivery truck in the future. My main goal was to publish my first game in C, which I did accomplish. This was also my first Ludum Dare, which I did enjoy, even though I had to sacrifice my entire weekend to finish this game. Design wise, this game is not too special; there are 4 levels and you win the game by reaching the delivery destination.

Theme: Delivery | Platform: Web

Mana

My next game is called Mana, a dice battling game where you must generate mana points to cast spells. This took two weeks to create, only because I spent sometime trying to figure out how to print the cards. It's a easy game to learn, but I hesitate to play it with others because each player has to keep track of how much mana they have using pen and paper. That ended up being a bad design choice that I will avoid in the future.

Theme: Dice battle game | Platform: Tabletop

Age of Empires

I'm still sad no one wanted to make an age of empires game during the design workshop so I made one myself lol. It plays similar to magic, but you have to manage a limited number of workers, there are only 6 units, and combat relies on dice rolling. I used the same unit counter system that the game uses so it could a good learning resource. The economy side of the game is simplified but the juggling between eco and war production is still present.

Emotion: Like a King | Platform: Tabletop

Resident Evil

During the first day of the Game Design Workshop at GDC, I worked with a team to create a table top game based off of Resident Evil. We chose "Tension" as primary emotion and we broke down the game into important verbs such as "Reload," "Resist," "Avoid," and "Shoot." In the game, the player explores a series of rooms that are filled with zombies, and potentially, useful items like health packs or ammo. The player needs to find the key to a secret laboratory and escape with a RNA sample. After 10 turns, Nemesis appears who is a invincible zombie that will chase you until you die or successfully escape.

Emotion: Tension | Platform: Tabletop

Runner

Scrolling became an interest for me so I decided to develop my own solution. Since I never programmed scrolling behavior before, I chose to create an endless runner because the gameplay is simple. The player onlys needs to press one button to jump over hurdles. There are coins that speed up the player when collected. Hitting a hurdle slows down the player, but in retrospect, I would rather make the player restart the level. I would become very irritated whenever I was slowed down and that is an emotion I want to avoid in my games. Also the player eventually becomes so fast that the hurdles become pointless. I thought about including a double jump collectable that was difficult to obtain to add a risk and reward element to the game, but I never got around to that.

Theme: Scrolling | Platform: Playdate

AirStrike

I was inspired by a crazy hailstorm that I saw outside my window to make a game about falling. I thought about making a nature game where you play as a cloud and you drop rain droplets on to the ground. I didn't how to challenge the player so I swapped the nature theme with war. The cloud became a plane that dropped bombs and below were anti-air guns that shot back. My original idea used a scrolling level, but since I wasn't sure how to do that, I kept the game within the bounds of the screen. This ended being a difficult limitation when deciding what the goal of the game should be. Eventually I ran out of time and the goal became kill all the anti-air guns in the level.

Theme: Falling | Platform: Playdate

Asteroids

This week I made an asteroids game. My challenge was to use the crank as a primary input, so I used it for rotation. I tied movement to shooting to make the game easier to play with the crank. Sadly I wasn't able fully flesh out the idea in time, as development took longer than expected and I waited until the end to solve design issues

Theme: Crank To Turn | Platform: Playdate

Circle

Circle is a pattern creation tool. Users can use the crank on their Playdate to control the radius of a circle. Once they confirm their radius size, the can draw more smaller circles until they run out of action points. The goal is to create an interest pattern using only circles and a limited amount of points. There is no challenge in pursuing the goal so I don't consider this to be a game, but it was fun first project for the Playdate console.

Theme: Pattern | Platform: Playdate