You can play it over here.

I’ll also be typing up a post-mortem at some point, which will eventually end up underneath the page I just linked.

Go play!

A lot of game developers, especially in the big leagues, spend all their time working on huge projects that can take years to finish. That’s a lot of time where you’re not actually reaping any rewards for all your hard work. Also, what if your game turns out bad? That must suck to work on something for years only to have everyone hate it. I can’t imagine anything more demoralising.

Game development is one of the most time-intensive of creative pursuits. I see some kick-ass artwork on deviant art and look at the description, where the artists claims it took twelve hours in total. I think to myself “That’s a lot!” and am suitably impressed, but is it actually a lot? I spent about twelve hours on making Kill Birds With Rockets and I consider that to be a very quick development time. It seems like traditional artists have the advantage of a far lower time requirement before people can appreciate their work. Does that mean that they ultimately get more satisfaction from their work by virtue of more actual creations, or is the satisfaction garnered from game development proportionate to the amount of time put into it? I’m not sure.

I’ve had my fair share of big projects and I usually find that after I while I get a bit tired of working on them – general boredom and such. Case in point: I haven’t worked on Duck Alliance for quite a while and am considering taking a break from it temporarily. The reason for this is I’m having so much fun making these dumb week games once a month that I might just focus entirely on really quick projects like that.

Hair stylists are creative folk too – they make artwork out of peoples’ hair, essentially. A hair stylist will usually work on many people throughout a given day. Eventually they’ll make a dud and mess someone’s hair up, but it’s no big deal because the next potential success is only minutes away.

So I think it’s worthwhile to work on smaller projects. It stops you from getting demotivated from working on the same project for an extended period of time, helps you prototype basic game ideas that could be worth developing further, gets more stuff out the door and into the world, and, most importantly, lets you get precious feedback and satisfaction much more often, even if it would be less than you would get from a full epic production.

It’s a really nice feeling to create something and release it out into the world for people to enjoy and it’s a feeling I fear many developers don’t get to enjoy often enough. So put aside your gigantic projects for a while and just make a stupid little shitty game or even a gimmicky app, tacky gradient balls and all, and get it out there. There’s a hojillion people out there playing web games – someone’s going to like it, even if it’s not a big viral hit, and if I can make something that can bring a smile to even a single person’s face then that’s a job well done.