Area 161

PoV’s Challenge: Make a Game and Sell a Copy in Oct

// September 27th, 2010 // By LordBron // First Game, Game Dev, iDevBlogADay

Make a game in October and make money off it. Can you do it?

If you’ve never heard of Ludum Dare, shame on you. It’s not only a game challenge, but probably one of the coolest! Here’s the description straight from the competition’s About page:

Ludum Dare is a regular accelerated game development Event.  Participants develop games from scratch in a weekend, based on a theme suggested by community.

Now, my favorite game challenge is the 12 hour game jam held at 360iDev.  However, Ludum Dare has to be a close second! Now, while making a game in 12 hours or over a weekend is all fun, the likelihood of whipping out a bestseller is slim. However, a month or so should be plenty of time to whip up a game that you can then profit from by either selling a copy, an ad or licensing it…right?

Well, that’s what the PoV aka Mike Kasprzak,  the current leader of Ludum Dare, thought as well. He was so sure of it, he issued his own PoV Challenge. I highly suggest you click that link and read up on the details, it’s a short post and the rules are simple. In fact, here they are in their entirety:

Make a game — take it to market — sell 1 copy (or license it, or earn $1 in ad rev)

That’s it. We indies talk a lot of talk, but very few ever deliver: Yours truly being one of those that have yet to deliver. I think, like PoV says, we do something to change that.

Wait?!? You wanna what?!?!

I told Smiley, the other half of Area 161, that we’re doing this challenge and his response was like the one above. There’s a bajillion reasons why one can’t deliver on this challenge:

• Not Enough Time
• Not a Solid Idea
• No Experience Selling a Game
• No Experience Making a Game

The list could go on and on. However, rather than adding to the list that I’m sure all you kind readers are already adding to my short list there, I figure we should tackle the opposite. Let’s list the reasons why we CAN deliver on the challenge:

• Why not?
• There’s 44, 640 minutes in October
• A house fly lives out their entire life in under a month (and they bug you for what seems like forever)
• How sweet would it be to have a game by Halloween (pun intended)
• With #iDevBlogADay, you have plenty of help
• With Ludum Dare, you’ll have even more help

Let’s do this thing!

I know the old saying, “Rome wasn’t built in a day.”  However, I’m thinking they were probably collecting taxes (if not at least pillaging) after 30 days! LOL

Now, I’m notorious for taking on bizarre challenges. My old business was begun on pretty much the same kinda whim: The great John Wilker, the notorious Ted Patrick and I created a conference for over 400 people on a whim in a few months. Surely a game for 1 person can be done in a month, right?

The nice thing about this challenge vs your typical game challenge is that you can take an existing game idea, one you’ve been working on for months (or years) or one you were hoping to have complete by year’s end and use it. Granted, you can always start from scratch but I know that a lot of people find that part way too daunting. Whatever works best for you, take one day to decide and run with it.

One game, one month, one chance.* You in or not?

In our next week’s post (and the next four posts after it), we’ll be tracking our progress and spilling the beans about our game.

*=Alright, so you’ll likely have more chances but that’s more dramatic sounding!  LOL