Greetings everyone!

I’m in for the OctoberChallenge and I’m really curious to see what I will be able to come up with.

Here is my plan:

I will take my game „Ideas“ which I made for Ludum Dare 24 and turn it into something which I hope will be commercially viable.

For everyone who missed out on my LD entry:

Ludum Dare 24: Ideas

It also received quite the favourable rankings:

Nevertheless, I feel that I can still improve on it pretty greatly.

The name „Ideas“ will only be a working title from now on as I have come up with a new story. It will still take place inside a persons mind, but with a drastically more serious tone to it. I don’t want to give everything away right now so I’ll just tell you this much: I want to hit some Inception-Fight Club’esque emotions here!

I’m pretty confident that i can pull this off, even though the time is really short. Time shortage also partially has to do with me starting to study Computer Science at the university this month.

To better manage my workload I started to actually make 3 different TODO-lists:

• One for the entire month in which I drop everything that needs to be done at some point and then forget about it.

• One for the upcoming week. I put about one weeks worth of stuff from the bigger list in here.

• And then – you might have guessed it – one for the next day. In here I put one or two items from the weeks list.

I hope this system will help to relieve the feeling of „oh jolly good f**k – this project is (too) huge!!“, as the smaller lists really break it down into more managable chunks and help beat the procrastinating demon lurking inside of me.

Back to the game.

I aim for 1-3 hours worth of playtime in the end so there is a lot of content to be created (comparing to the 2-20 minutes of the original entry… depending on how great or sucky your platformer skills are). There will definitely need to be a handful of new game mechanics to make the journey stay fresh and interesting the whole time.

Today I finally took a leap of faith and jumped right into the horrible mess of code I left after the LD. 8 hours worth of digging and I refactored most of it and scratched some parts („UI“ and the simple scripting) which need to be redone.

Gosh, that was scary! But now I can happily start on some new features and improvements which are desperately needed for a product that eventually shall sale.

There are of course a lot more things to consider, including a simple but hopefully effective business and marketing plan. I will try to update you about my progress at least every couple of days. Until then, take this screenshot which practically still looks just like my LD entry:

Jump, Jump!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 3rd, 2012 at 12:39 pm and is filed under October Challenge 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.