Two weeks to make a game. Two weeks after going through an entire year of making my first commercial undertaking…and during the Christmas/New Years holiday too. Am I completely nuts?

I had planned to finished Spirits a month before the competition deadline, which would give me plenty of time to whip up a game before January. But, as you’re all very much aware, I’m not all that good at meeting my own deadlines. Thankfully I’m pretty dang good at meeting other people’s deadlines, which might explain how I managed to get my college degree, since I went into college the same way I came out: pretty clueless about pretty much everything.

So what does one do with just two weeks of pure game programming? Well, scratch that, as two of those days were spent with family and friends during the holidays. So what does one do with twelve days? Well, unless you already have a game outline, not a whole lot. I’ve already discussed how the game was originally a tower defense game before being broken down into a simpler arcade game, so I’d like to talk more about the technical/art aspect of the game.

I was literally on my own for the art and design of the game…there was no time to rely on anyone but me. I’m not much of an artist, and gawd knows I’ve tried dearly to be one, but as an optical illusionist, well, I can be pretty handy. I could take the rudimentary sprites I created and make them even worse looking on purpose to achieve a new kind of graphical style that I had wanted: a pseudo old-school feel that’s completely wrong tech wise, but works in an art sense. The green screen computers I used to have to use at my elementary looked nothing like greenTech does, but it still gives me that same sense of nostalgia that I can recall from my ol’ fourth grade days of Oregon Trail and whatever else educational software we had on floppies.

It was too much fun, taking somewhat ok looking sprites and graphics and upping the “mosaic” count in Photoshop to make them look pixelated and somewhat unpleasing to the eye. There’s no geometry I took into account here, such as making sure the pixels were consistent with each other so everything had the same amount of the “pixelated” feel. There was simply no time.

Early on I had decided, for some reason, to do the color correction in real time. So the above picture is what greenTech looks like without any fancy effects. This is my naked art, and it’s not too pretty. It’s an art style that I think I might have gone with a few years ago, as I loved the simplistic look back in the day, but now I realize that it’s not going to cut the mustard if I wanted it to get more attention to it. So, I took a monitor and a silhouette of a face, reflected it off a screen, and overlayed it on the screen. But it didn’t look quite right.

I took the above image, blurred the face and background quite a bit, and overlayed it. Now we’re cooking. But it still looked too clean. There was no way I was going to achieve a retro green screen effect without warping the screen to a bubble CRT-like image. And the results were much better than I had expected…but at the same time, created some interesting challenges.

Here’s the full screen, before the screen warping:

And now afterwards:

Notice how, despite the game being 800×600 in both pictures, that i get significant screen croppage. It had turned my 800×600 space into 700×500. Not only that, but benchmark testing in the VG Labs showed that the game would only be able to run in 30fps instead of the usual 60fps that I shoot for, which as it turns out, worked just fine for the game.

Because of my time limitations and because of the game’s structure and art, I cut out quite a few things that my games should usually have. No v-sync or anti-aliasing (intentional, because it would only take away from the retroness anyways). No medals and milestones, since the game’s linearity really made it unnecessary for them in the first place. Nothing but pure unadulterated gameplay, and let me tell you, it was the most fun I’ve had making a game in a long, long time.

For three straight days I worked on the game from 8AM to about 1AM. It wasn’t the mad drive of finishing the game for the deadline in as much as it was getting the joy of making a level, testing it, and having a great stage in about two hours. I actually did the same with LittleBigPlanet (I had a week of pure gameplayin’ with the beta). Once something clicks, I try not to leave it…because I’m afraid it won’t be there when I return. That spark of energy, or joy of game making. But it stayed with me, all the way until I submitted the game.

Do I think it’ll win the GM Competition? I dunno. I’ve lost so many competitions, failed at so many things in life, that I’m a bit numb to it all. Hey, if I can get honorable mention, that would be awesome.

But in my heart…I really need this win. I haven’t lost the drive to make games and I don’t think anything will make me, but boy, it sure would be great to win, wouldn’t it? It would at least validate that I’m on the path to somewhere. I’ve been down the game journalism path, the movie reviewing path, the 2D animation path, the coffee-barista path, and I’m sure there’s many paths to come. But game making is the only path that I feel like going down in the next twenty years of my life. My dad once told me to do what I love to do as a living, and not to worry so much about the money. Do what you love to do, and the money will come. I’m doing what I love. The money hasn’t come yet. I’d be naive to think it was easy, but it’s not easy. I’m thinking about becoming a substitute teacher as a temp job for some quick cash…and at 23, that seems a tad bit intimidating, but the money is good. As Citizen Kane said, it’s easy to make money, if that’s all you want to do, is make money.

But hey, I’ve lost before and I’m ready to lose again. It was a blast to make, I learned quite a bit, and people seem to like it so far. Plus it was featured on the Weekend Downloads on jayisgames.com. And you know something? That’s pretty darn awesome.