For uDevGames 2008, I’m currently in the phase where I’m still choosing an idea to expand on and turn into a game. As I mentioned in my previous post, it’s important to both choose one that’s doable in the three-month time frame but also one that’s ambitious enough to challenge me, inspire me, and also wow people when we get into the voting stage.
I have no shortage of ideas for games, so I’ve been quick to identify three that would be most suitable for the next three months.
The first is TANK. TANK is a kind of running joke on the Best Damn Podcast Ever. We came up with it in ages past, but all we really said about it is you have a “tank that is so big it shoots out smaller tanks.” I have a pretty good vision for where I’d like to take the concept. It’s kind of similar on the surface to Arachnoid, with a few gameplay enhancements, as well as discrete, linear levels and the appropriate enemies and bosses. While this would be awesome, the amount of art assets it would require are actually quite high. Even if art was my strong point (which, I assure you, it is not) I would be very hard pressed to complete this in three months. That, plus the gameplay at the moment is the least engaging of the three ideas, this might not be the one.
The second idea is an unnamed space shooter. I’ve been dying to do one for a long time. I was actually going to enter one for the OMG Cup back in 2005, but I got a job at the same time and ended up shelving it. (This game is my first truly independent effort since then.) The genre plays to my strengths very well, as I tend to focus best on hardcore action games, and I live for the twitch. It also begs for lots of visceral effects, which I also have a thing for. While it wouldn’t be the most original idea, I do know a few innovations that I can bring over from other genres that would make it something that people haven’t seen before. Complexity wise, we’re not talking as much as TANK, since spaceships and the like don’t tend to need to animate nearly as much as soldiers running around tanks. But I still need enemies, levels, and scrolling backgrounds. And like I said, my art tends to be shit.
The third idea is in place as a fallback in case even the shmup ends up being too complex. It’s also a shooter, but it’s more oldschool arcade cabinet in style, where you have one totally visible playfield, a few lives, and you play until you die. The concept is tried and true, but I’ve got a pretty original idea. It’s an experiment in adaptive difficulty that I’ve been toying with and that I’ve been dying to prototype. It’s the least complex of the three ideas by far. Artwise, it’s very abstract, to the point where the enemies can be simple geometric shapes. It also has no levels, just “waves” between which are a simple breather, then the game algorithm starts up again. The downside, is that this game may not be ambitious enough for me. It’s much harder to work tons of guns into this idea, for instance. But the fact that it needs little art, no levels, and the fact that I still have a full time job that takes priority means that I may have to scale back my delusions of grandeur. 
Perhaps that’s advice for fellow uDevGames veterans: resist the urge to step up the scope too much just because you’ve done it before. I’ve heard it said that your second game is a much, much harder than your first, and perhaps it’s because the whole time you’re trying to top what you’ve already accomplished. I was a bit lucky in that my second game had to be a three-week effort, but now, faced with another three-month contest, I may need to restrain myself from going too apeshit, especially since I can only put maybe 10-20 hours a week into it. We’ll see what happens.
