Teaser: I’m going to create a game in 24 hours and then sell it by whatever means possible! Background: This experiment was prompted by one of my previous posts, “Casual Game Price Point: $6.99 and Falling“. There are obvious price wars going on in the casual market and while consumers are always happy about lower prices, the developer and any affiliates feel the burden. While my long term plan is to create an MMO (currently in the early stages of development), I thought it would be a pretty cool ‘experiment’ to see if I can create a game from start to finish in 24 man hours and then sell it via whatever channels require the least amount of effort. If the portals want to sell all of their games for bargain prices, then I’m going to develop something that’s fitting of that price. I’m certainly not going to spend $10,000 – 100,000 and 2 years of development time to have my product dropped in the bargain bin after a week! Purpose: I guess the purpose of this experiment is 2-fold… 1. Can I create a game with acceptable production values in 24 hours? 2. Will it meet publisher’s standards and actually make money? Hypothesis: I’m torn on this one… either I will not be able to complete a game with acceptable production values in 24 hours or I will and it will make about $5000. Either way I’ll probably feel like a huge sell out at the end and go back to working on my MMO. Materials: Torque Game Builder Pro v1.7.4 Artwork/Audio that I can purchase royalty-free (creating the rest myself) Method: If you’ll notice above, I said 24 MAN hours. I have a full time job and I’m fairly busy on the weekends, plus I don’t really think I can be productive for 24 hours straight, so I’ve decided to split up the 24 hours a bit. I have a vacation day this Friday (10/23) and plan on spending at least 12 hours then. The remainder of the time will be spent on Saturday or Sunday for as much as I can squeeze in. I know… not as exciting as 24 hours straight, but I’m almost 30 and my Jolt days are over! Observations: I will be posting my updates on my blog after each work session. Conclusions: I will be posting a final update on my blog once I have completed all 24 man hours. Wish me luck!
I'm sensing a third outcome... I won't spoil it for you, however. Good luck. I look forward to seeing what 24 hours bring. If it was that easy to become a "sell out" by packing $6.99 worth of cake icing and particle effects into a casual game, we'd all be doing it.
try to publicize the project as much as possible, get all the attention you can get. Could sell well even if it does turn out rubbish.
Hey, thanks for the replies and encouragement! @Indiepath - the time does include debugging and if I run into a bug that takes me too long to fix, the game will not be completed in 24 hours. As far as the finishing... I plan on putting as much finishing as I can in the time allotted @Maupin - I agree... I'm just trying to buck the system a bit... if it works, awesome! If not, then I'm sure it will be a learning experience if nothing else. @AnthemAudio - good idea, I posted a few forums, but maybe a press release would be warranted?
If you're restricting yourself to an arbitrary timeline, I think you must adhere to it completely or why even have the timeline? Absolutely; market it all you can. Good luck!
This is fun and im already excited to see what you come up with. Are you going to do an hour by hour blog or a making of after? GL! Darren.
Ok, I'm not trying to be rude or anything... Just want to rectify some facts: Casual doesn't mean CRAP games. Actually, it does mean the exact opposite. Casual games need to have a HUGE amount of polish so player get stuck into your game for an hour for free and accept to open their wallet. Just look at the games released on BFG lately. Do you really think you can seriously make a game in 24 hours competing with this type of quality? The anwser is obviously NO. In this time frame you might be able to do an average Flash game... may be. But a quality casual game: NO. Game creation is not easy. Normaly, I wouldn't bother posting such a reply... but I'm just getting anoyed that people thinks casual == easy crap. I spent the last 15 months full time on my latest casual game, and if you include my lost salary, I have invested more than 100k in this game. That's just what you have to do if you want to compete. 24 hours? LOL JC
Yes definitely If you just take a look even at the 20000 HO games on portals each of them must cost a fortune on artwork only. People not in casual industry might do the association $6.99 = crap game (which is common among my friends who pay $50+ for the latest xbox games). But anyone that has at least played one of those games released in last 2 years knows it's absolutely not true. In 24h you can't even make a competitive flash game now...
Forget the "can't do decent game in 24 hours"... just go for it! Fun to see how this goes. As for this question... Quite likely the answer is: no.
"I’m torn on this one… either I will not be able to complete a game with acceptable production values in 24 hours or I will and it will make about $5000" If you can make a game in 24 hours that profits at least $5000.00, then I would certianly give up your mmo goals and just write 24 hour games the rest of your programming career. Tell you what...take it easy on yourself and just write 4 a month, that's what...4 days and 20k a month? Sounds easy enough.
To be fair it's not an impossible task to make a flash games in 24 man hours and make close to 5k. It's not a normal occurrence but it's possible.
@richtaur - I'm not sure I completely understand what you mean, but basically I was saying that the goal is to have a game with acceptable production values. Obviously it will not look as nice as something that's been polished for months. @Dyno - I'm not going to do an hour by hour only because I think it would break my groove, but I'm thinking every 6 hours (or whenever I'm due for a break). The updates will be posted as new blog posts. @jcottier/Jack - You're not being rude... I completely expect that you are right, and I know how hard it is to create any game (casual or not) and I certainly wasn't inferring that casual games are crap. Invadazoid took me quite a long time and that doesn't have the production values of today's games. If I thought it was easy, it wouldn't be an experiment, it would just be a daily task @Game Producer - thanks for the encouragement! @JGOware - then I would definitely be a sell out... but a rich one @defanual - same here!
You will probably not finish your MMO anyway. I second the option of becoming a sellout but keep in mind that: -whatever time you spend working on it, there is absolutely no guaranteed minimum income (I think the lowest price offered by flash portals for a flah game -a very bad one- is around $200 (well that was 2 years ago), but that's only for flash and the market is becoming crowded). You can make a very polished casual game, give it to a bigfishgames and sell 10 copies or less. -24 hrs is really not enough for anything serious, try 2 weeks for a start. I doubt you'll get much money or at all with a 24hrs game. OR WE'D ALL BE DOING IT!
well after visiting you site I see you have released a couple games with rather good production values, so I retract my statement You might be able to finish a mmo,but in any case it will probably drain all the sweat and the blood from your body before you have finished it.
Interesting experiment (emphasis on "experiment"). Obviously it won't be able to compete with most of the casual games out there, but it will be interesting to see what the final outcome will be. I've seen some great "Game in a Day" type games, but I wouldn't put most of them in the "sellable" category. Since you are using TGB, you might be able to publish this as a iPhone app, since expectations are much lower there (though I'm not familiar with with how you do that in TGB, but I remember that being an option at one time). Chances are you'll make next to nothing doing it, but I wish you well with the experiment!
Doing a game in a day is not only good fun, it's a decent way to test out ideas for future game projects. Never done one where I thought the result was sellable, although I do know people selling iPhone and 360 apps/games that have been created in under a week and making a good enough return to offset the time. We did a Game in a day back in 2007, Brew Isles (using TGE rather than from scratch) and a 2d game idea tested out in a more recent GID is in the process of been recreated as a full project. So while I'm not so sure on the sellable part, you'll at least know whether the core idea is fun or not