Rapid Game Development

There is something to be said about the game development process.  It can be a long and difficult rollercoaster ride of bugs, features, and deadlines.  But sometimes we say to ourselves, “what can we do in X days” and we push ourselves to see what we can do.  Rapid game development is a fun challenge we have here at Armor Games and it’s a great way to really see what our developers can do.

While most games take weeks to months we sometimes set a 1-5 day challenge.  In this time we explore new concepts or generate great ideas and put them to the simplest use possible.  Like the concept of the Global Game Jam developers are given a topic and a certain amount of days to go at it.  It’s an invigorating, fresh way to game development.

For example, one my latest games, Run Elephant Run (pictured above), was a 2-day challenge.  The challenge was to create a game that involved a minor storyline and papparazzi, and somehow it came together in less than 16 hours.

Another game with an incredibly short development cycle was Scribble!  This game was developed in my dorm room at about 8pm at night and finished later that morning. It was less than a day in production!

The fun part about all this is that if the games work out we can develop them into possibly bigger sequels.  We love making games and pushing ourselves so these time crunches are a lot of fun.  Stressful towards the end, but for only a few days work it’s amazing how fast the brain moves to come up with simple game ideas.  Something about tiny gameplay ideas just make them flow through the development process.

We’re going to do another in-house game challenge sometime this year.  Stay tuned!