Plan for Jay Barnson

Game In A Week- The Halfway Point Is it possible to create an RPG in a single week FROM SCRATCH, with a budget of $0?

It began with a mini-rant (what, me, rant?).

My boast was that if you gave me a week, a machine with a fresh install of Windows, and an Internet connection, I could put together a reasonably fun, enjoyable game. No, nothing spectacular - if I could do something great so quickly and easily, I'd be rich. But the contention was that there's enough free / public-domain / open-source code and content available on the Internet now that it's very possible for independent game developers with an extremely tiny budget can put something together.

Well, Tom Bampton (of Game-In-A-Day fame) called me on it, and added an additional restriction - it had to be done using a basic API and not a full-featured Game Engine (since some of what's out there could crank out a boring, derivative game with just some tweaks of content - that'd be cheating, right?)

Well, there's no WAY my boss would give me a week off to do this. So at first I blew off the challenge (after all, Void War was done more-or-less from scratch with extremely cheap tools & content, so I've paid those dues). But the more I thought about it, the more I thought it would be a fun Game-Fu exercise. I thought about what I could do, but doing yet another Space Invaders / Breakout game didn't excite me very much.

Well, one of the little (false) factoids that go around in the indie game dev community is that indies can't do RPGs. Mainly this is more of a "white lie" told to the endless stream of dreamers who imagine they can exceed the latest Final Fantasy epic with a dedicated team of three and a budget of $200. I always contend if you scope it down, it's quite doable. Spiderweb does okay, after all, with some definite "old school" independent RPGs. I whipped out probably a half-dozen kinda-sorta complete RPGs in the Commodore 64 days (when games like Ultima, The Temple of Apshai, and Wizardry ruled the roost). So, deciding the challenge of simply creating a game from scratch, with no budget, in a single week wasn't hard enough... I decided to make am RPG out of it.

I decided on Python/PyGame because they are 100% free - anybody can use it - and I had some professional experience working with Python. PyGame I'm barely familiar with at all, but it's also 100% free, using the SDL, so it seemed like a good idea at the time. It's pretty much a solo project - though my brother has contributed some tunes he composed and performed for grins.

Now, this may simply prove some people's point that "it can't be done," as what I've got at the halfway point (just over 20 hours into my 40), as it has terrible programmer-art so far, but here's my "RPG - from scratch - in a week" project so far: HACKENSLASH! - an Old Skool RPG.



It's sort of an Ultima / Apshai-esque title right now. No, it's not going to give Diablo a run for it's money. We'll see how far I get in the next 20 hours. Rooms, items, characters, and features are being displayed just fine; navigation between rooms (and up / down stairs) with the mouse is working, and I've got a simple menu system working.

I am also keeping a pretty detailed hour-by-hour journal of what I'm doing, where I'm going, and why I'm making the decisions I'm making in development. Sort of an example of the game-development process (with all the mistakes and ugliness) in fast-forward mode. So if this fails horribly, maybe there can be some lessons learned that can be applied to a larger-scale project.

Regardless, this is a very fun experiment for me, and if at the end of 40 hours all I have is an education, it is still time well-spent.