Great games created on insane deadlines

Winda Benedetti Citizen Gamer • E-mail

It’s been said that necessity is the mother of invention. But if that lean lady is baby mama to our creative ambitions, then surely the daddy of invention is that unforgiving bastard named Deadline.

You know him: He’s the guy forever hovering over your shoulder shouting, “Hurry up! You haven’t got much time!” And while Father Deadline is a fantastic pain in the rump, without him breathing down our necks most of us human beings would never get around to inventing anything.

Just ask Petri Purho. The 24-year-old video game developer from Helsinki knows a thing or two about deadlines and inventions. Back in September of 2006, he gave himself a whopper of a deadline — he vowed he would create a new game every month for at least a year and that he would take no more than seven days to make each one.

It seems deadlines — even the self-imposed ones — work like a charm. Earlier this week, Purho unveiled his 21^st game — the colorful and delightfully addictive “Planet of the Jellies,” which is like “Space Invaders” meets “Bejeweled” and can be downloaded for free from his Web site.

“If I don't have a deadline, I usually just sit home watching telly or surfing pointless Web sites,” Purho says. “So, having committed myself to this silly monthly games project, I'm just mostly motivating myself.”

He’s not alone. Independent and hobbyist game developers around the world have discovered that forcing themselves to make games under insanely tight deadlines is a great way to get games made. More importantly, it’s a great way to make some innovative, unusual and even some downright awesome games.

The award-winning game "Crayon Physics Deluxe" has players use their mouse to make crayon drawings in the game world.

Creating games in two-and-a-half days
This Friday in Toronto, a group of Canadian developers will show off the 37 games they created in a mere two-and-a-half days as part of the third annual Toronto Independent Game Development Jam (that’s TOJam for short).

Meanwhile, three of the winning games from this year’s Independent Games Festival got their start under the deadline gun. Purho’s much-lauded game “Crayon Physics Deluxe” won the IGF grand prize and is based on a game he made in five days. Indie gaming hit “Audiosurf” won the Audience and Excellence in Audio awards and got its start as part of developer Dylan Fitterer’s seven-day game prototyping project. And “World of Goo” — winner of the Design Innovation and Technical Excellence awards — started out as “Tower of Goo,” a little game made in four days as part of the Experimental Gameplay Project.

The EGP got its start back in 2005 when four grad students at Carnegie Melon University decided they were fed up with the state of mainstream gaming.

Fed up with mainstream gaming
“We were bored with all the big budget games with all the crazy technology that couldn’t run on our computers,” says Kyle Gabler, one of the founders. “They were huge and overly complicated but they weren’t fun in the same way they were fun when we were kids. And we were like, ‘hey games don’t have to be complicated to be fun.’”

So Gabler and his cohorts set out to make as many simple-yet-fun games as they could in one semester, requiring each game be made in a week’s time and by one person only. By the time the semester was over, they’d made more than 50 games, many of them in only four days.

Granted, these weren’t exactly fully fleshed out video games as much as they were prototypes — bite-sized bits of fun that could be played for short periods of time while showcasing new styles of gameplay, not to mention the developer’s creative talents. The project piqued the interest of game industry executives. After all, it begged the question: How did four students make so many new, imaginative games in such a short period of time?

MORE FROM CITIZEN GAMER

Citizen Gamer Section Front

Video games are cheaper than couples therapy Wake up to video game sleeper hits Gaming our way to musical genius Will gamers go for Sony's PSPgo? Which game machine is right for you? In dark gaming times, Nintendo DS shines Is the president a video game hater? Console wars: Microsoft drops Xbox 360 price Sony introduces slimmer PS3 and big price cut With video games, it’s feast or famine Citizen Gamer Section Front   Add Citizen Gamer headlines to your news reader: