The week after Freeplay
This weekend was Freeplay, as some of you may know. For those not in the know, its a yearly Indie Games Festival held to showcase the latest projects, share information and knowledge, and help boost the general sense of Independent Game Development.
Unfortunately due to time constraints I only attended the last part of Friday’s events, and I was ill (my own doing) on Saturday and managed to completely miss the entire day. So what do I have to say that’s worth reading, since I wasn’t there for most of it? Not a lot. Just that the two sessions I managed to go to were absolutely awesome and inspiring.
Firstly, I managed to attend The art of getting things done presented by Rory Hart. For a session on Project Management, I think a lot of us were surprised by the number of people who turned up. The room was packed. It was a good session and started the seed idea of “Just Do It.” This is a problem I think a lot of us face. We have GREAT IDEAS™ which we never actually do anything with, or we dawdle about and occasionally poke at them hoping it’ll get us somewhere eventually. A truth I’m reminded of more often lately is that ideas are absolutely worthless without execution. If it’s stuck in your head, no one actually cares how great it is. Solution? Stop wasting time. I am interested in something he said along the lines of “if you haven’t worked on it for a week or more, move on, you’re not passionate enough about that idea.” (Paraphrased)
Which leads us in to the next speaker, Petri Purho. He is the brilliant man who created Crayon Physics Deluxe. What did he have to talk about? Making Shit Games. That’s right. Making crappy, ugly little prototype games to get your ideas out of your head, and into a testable and playable demo. He makes a new game prototype every month. He only spends 7 days on the process though. This allows a lot of GREAT IDEAS™ to actually be made real, so you can see that they’re horrible ideas, and no one would ever play them. But, as pointed out: it’s better to only spend seven days on a worthless idea, than two years.
I think the inspiration of those two sessions and speakers alone was worth the $20 I paid to get for the weekend. I’m seriously looking at my ideas, my skills, and my tools and I think I will begin a project much like he and the Experimental Gameplay Project (I believe they actually started the first 7day prototyping projects). I’ll spend the next week or so getting to terms with Flex/AS3 and SDL/C++ and see if I can’t start cranking out some shitty games. One a month, at least one of them has to be worth something, right?
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