SyntaxBomb - Indie Coders

As an exercise I gave myself I wanted to see if I could both create a simple, playable, strategy game for 2 players (on the same PC) in a short space of time and screen-record the development of the game.

The results after the first day are shown below:

(you can see the clock tick by in the bottom corner of the video as I'm working...the video is running at about 60x speed, eg every second you watch the video 1 minute passes approximately)

Development:


Gameplay:

I was fascinated by this. I've never used blitz3d before and probably couldn't learn much about how it works from a time-lapse like this, and i have to admit that the game type doesn't interest me at all, but what I really found interesting was your development speed. 

I'm going to assume you didn't actually burn through all this game creation in one block of 12 hours, and just had a stop/start timer to monitor your work? It's still working really quickly, though, which impresses the fuck out of me as I really struggle to put in more than a couple of hours at a time, even when i'm not in a development block.

When I was younger I had more focus and could do longer sessions, but still had a start and drop mentality, which left so much shit that I never actually finished because something else more appealing usually occurred to me. I'm ok with working to deadlines, in fact it often helps me to get games completed. Our Syntax bomb competitions are a classic example proving this. But when I'm doing a game with no pressure of timelines, or even if I'm setting my own time to do each part, I still find myself distracted, or just can't push them over the finish line.

If you're able to develop games like this in that kind of time frame then I'm really jealous. I only completed one game last year, and this year I've already canned 4 ideas after doing some coding to test how they might work. I'm currently working on a relatively simple platform game and I'm not even sure I'll be able to finish that before the end of the year, if at all.

Thanks Xerra,

You're going to hate me for saying this but yes...I did burn through it all in under twelve hours...you can see the system clock in the lower right corner with the date and time ticking away showing exactly when I built it.

Thanks for the feedback. I have an advantage over most people though which is that I no longer work nor have a family to support or interact with. I live alone - hence the easy long hours I can spend on this sort of thing.

Here's a downloadable and some screenshots, source code included. (3 hours additional work done to complete to this point)

Itch Io Game Link

Another 4-5 hours of work as recorded in my timelapse screen recording of development.

Added - dice, board, transitions, ai players, demo mode, and a few other bits and pieces....

And this is how it looks in play:

Link: Game

Wish I no longer worked. However, even if i didn't, I still don't think I could throw 12 hours continuous into game development without some kind of break. A walk, nap, or just chilling out the old brain cells watching some brain-dead tv. I'm an old fart though, so that's probably why. I probably did code for long hours like this in my youth. I'm just too old to remember it.

@Matty, verry impressive stuff, thanks for sharing. As a Blitz3D fan - this is awesome!

12 hours at once..... fair play. I'm like Xerra - bit of an old stale fart these days. Most of my time is chasing the elixir of youth (out walking - although yesterday think I managed to jog for 100 yards with the dog  )

Some more changes...I'll post the next timelapse video as soon as it's converted from images to an mp4 and uploaded to Youtube.....but here's some screenies of the game now:

In Day 3 I added the following features:

As usual the code is all visible in game.bb on the itch.io page (https://matty77.itch.io)

Changes include:
1. Improved AI opponent.
2. Let units move about the board a bit more freely, instead of just along their column.
3. Dice throws actually cause the dice to land visually with the right side facing up based on what happens internally in the game.
4. Attempted to scale the game to be larger sized units, but was unsuccessful, so kept it in a separate file for now.
5. A few bug fixes.
6. Changed the help menu a little bit.
7. Trees and rocks and bushes added to the board.

And that's what most of the time was spent on.

YouTube link:

This is starting to make me actually want to look at Blitz3D and see what it can do. Particularly as Mark seems to have picked it up again recently and is working on it.

Wish we had a Mac version of the actual IDE, though. I don't want to code in Windows. I use the Mac much more. Oh, and I have to admit that it would be great to use Blide again, although it's probably well broken by now.

Thanks 3DzForMe and Xerra, much appreciate the comments.

Yeah - Blitz3d makes it very easy to put 3d stuff on screen. If you're starting out from scratch, one of the more modern engines is a better bet but it's still very good for what it does.

Here's a video of gameplay on my game - the computer is playing against itself in this short clip:

Matty is clearly a coding *machine* As morpheus once said...Or something similar. 

Thanks, I tallied up the work so far based on the video feed being 5 minutes coding time = 6 seconds video time lapse (approximately) as:

3,405 lines of code written in 17 hours and 45 minutes. Or approximately 200 lines per hour.

(There was a bunch of design work I did with pencil and paper in a cafe before I even touched a PC to code it...once that was done it was almost just 'typing' things out since I already knew how to build what I planned on building)

How the game looks now:

(there's a few bugs in the video with units moving into the same square, I fixed that after the video was recorded...)