A murder...

One of the things I wanted to do this year was make more short form games. Short form is more conducive to creativity than long form, I think, because there's less psychological burden when writing off an idea that didn't quite work. Also, it frees you from worrying about tangential things that are standard in modern games, like stories.

Timescale is important. Too much time and it's easy to overstretch. Too short and you don't make anything worth showing.

A week long is one of my favorite timescales. It's enough time that you can make something, but its a small enough window that you can't do everything. You have to be ruthless about what you cut, and what you prioritize. I'm not pretending I'm good at it, but I think I've learned more from my week-long games than I have from any of my longer projects. It also forces you to create games that don't rely on lots of content. It feels a bit more pure in a sense, because you have to rely on interesting gameplay rather than lots of gameplay.

So this year, I managed to make two one-week games.

The first was called Bregma. It was about a crazy cat lady protecting her cats from the local children trying to steal them.

The second one is called A Murder of Crows. It's a bit stranger. (somehow). Here's a gameplay video:

">Linky (I was going to embed it but I don't think the forum software will let me)

I was going to write some lessons learned, but I'm sleepy so I'll write those tommorow.