NaGaDeMo 2012 - Day One
NaGaDeMo, short for National Game Development Month, starts today(June 1st). NaGaDeMo is inspired by the much celebrated NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, where writers attempt to write 50,000 words in thirty days. In this case, instead of writing a novel, the goal is to FINISH a game. I've signed up.
While I was writing my book, Learning HTML5 Game Programming, people told me their game or book ideas. When asked if they started, they often said they would have if not for X, Y, or Z reason. Very few of the dreamers ever start. Of those that do, even less finish. The first draft of that book or game doesn't have to be perfect as long as it is complete. No game ever shipped the first iteration of its codebase.
For me, NaGaDeMo means getting rid of excuses. Having limited time also accelerates decision making. Want to make your own physics engine instead of an open source solution? That extra effort is gonna cost you features in other areas. A hard deadline means that I want to work harder and faster towards an MVP [Minimum Viable Product] faster so I don't embarrass myself.
Because I've written games before, I wanted to up the ante a little for myself and tack on the task of blogging pretty heavily. So if starting and finishing a game is difficult, why am I raising the stakes for myself? Firstly, like all authors I'm a masochist. Second, I think the journey of this process be good reading. As much as I complained about the bad food, long hours, and lack of sleep while writing my first book, I've caught the itch again. Writing everyday is good practice.
Over the next month, my posts will explore all parts of the game making process from setting up dev environments to coding and sourcing and creating assets to hopefully, deployment. I have a game concept and some of the post ideas sketched out put wanted to remain true to the task and not start until June 1st. Thanks for taking the ride with me and by the way, buy my book.