Experience of finishing multiplayer game in 8 hours

Finishing things is hard, I almost never do.

INTRODUCTION

All my gamedev attempts died prematurely, I would guess I just wanted to do too much. As they say, scope was too big.

I tried to resolve this issue by developing(finishing!!!) simple games in 4 hours, no matter what. I did it and it was great! I finish those games, they kinda suck, but they are playable. (I made 4, You can find them on my page)

So then I decided that I'm ready for year long game development adventure(how  naive). I spend next 7 month of my life developing smth between WipeOut and SubwaySurfer... well as you can imagine it did't go well. I encounter issues on every step and convinced myself that I need to restart project 3 times. It was devastating,  just too much for my tiny brain to handle. All of the 3D assets need to be modeled, SFX and audio, controllers for movement of player and all different enemies, DAMN animation takes SO LONG to do right, now I see why ppl hire artists, it was thousands more issues with optimization, rendering etc, too much to write everything here. At the end I just embraced that I can't do it, and I started another one...

My another dead-born project was "Hotel" of sorts, idea was to make 2D hotel where dialog will be a combat and it will be multiplayer(of course lol)... Well, you can guess what happened, after 2 month it was just 2 sync players with AssetFREE animations, running around AssetFREE tileset, not what I envisioned at all... So the message was loud and clear to me: "I overestimate my abilities." that's all.

8 Hour Development

After all of that I decided that I need to finished smth. Idea was simple, write as many stupid ideas as I can pick one and force myself finish it in 8 hours. Number 8, and not 4 as before, because I still wanna include multiplayer and intuition was that I need twice more time on that(it was a good idea). 

Of course I procrastinated first, by writing a stop-clock for tracking time of development.

To be honest, to actually finish everything in 8-hour-game took me more like 10 hours of work total. Clock was running only when I was actively developing, on any distraction clock was stopped. 

Well first 3 hours where just to make ColorRect move on a screen on player and server. 

Then I realize to put all of the things that I think need to be implemented to "inbox/inProgress/Done" in trello.  So next couple hours where writing some features that need to be done in "inbox", picking the most impactful one move to "inProgress" start timer and develop till it works well enough. Running timer kinda prevents you from overengineering or abstracting too much. So when it's done you move it to "done" pick next one and just keep going until clock hit 8 hours. 

Conclusion

I feel that it was fun, and by the end "inbox" pile and "done" pile are the same size. What does it mean? I didn't implement half of what I thought was important and game is still playable. Is it a good game? I don't think so, but it's exist, I made it and You can play it.

I think forcing myself to end-up with playable, finished game at the end of that one development cycle is great. It feels so much better and more rewarding, then theorizing about how to make best game for 7 month and at the end you can't even play that "amazing game" that was theorized. I'm thinking if i need to polish or add features into the game I can do another 8 hours sprint... OMG did I just re-invent AGILE? anyway... 

This is just my experience, I just wanna reflect and learn from it. Maybe someone else can too.