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Ever wanted to write your own game? Can’t be too hard, right?

Most games sold today are ego shooters. But the genre is sucked pretty dry. The most innovative games in the last years were simple, surprising and cheap. Examples are Braid, Fez, Thomas Was Alone. Those games didn’t thrive from multi-million development budgets, they throve from simple ideas. They were great not despite but because of their limitations.

In this series of blog posts, I’ll show you how to develop a very simple game using Processing.

Processing is a simple environment to create amazing computer generated images using a simplified version of Java like the one on the right (code).

Komplexe Methoden – M.1 Zufall und Rauschen – M.1.6 Agenten im Raum – M_1_6_01_TOOL

While you download the software, we need an idea.

In my case, the idea came from a brainstorming session organized by Zurich Game Developers at the MechArtLab. Everyone had to buy a Kinder Surprise egg (illegal in the USA, btw.) and create a game with the content. The eggs in my group contained a platypus, a crocodile and a frog.

After a quick brainstorming session we came up with this game idea: “Kribbit, the frog, runs a zoo. A small zoo. A very small zoo. Only a single compound. He has two animals: A poor, lonely platypus and a couple of crocodiles. The crocodiles promised to be nice to the platypus and not to eat him. But every time Kribbit looks the other way, the crocodiles try to eat poor Platty.”

That’s it. Game idea? Check.

What? Too simple for you? Well, complex game = low chance of success.

Next post: Setup and a simple player character.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 15th, 2013 at 22:16 and is filed under Game, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.