Make a Game Month – #makgammon

Do you have dreams of making a game, be it physical, computerised, or otherwise?  Are those long November evenings looking cold and empty?  Read on.

Jubilee- a card game inspired by group theory, by Amy Worthington

Jubilee- a card game inspired by group theory, by Amy Worthington

November is known to many hobbyist authors as National Novel-Writing Month, a month where you can sit down every evening and write 1667 words.  At the end of 30 days, you’ve written 50,000 words, and you can claim to have written a novel.  This year I had made plans to do exactly that, but as I evolved my ideas into a plot, I realised that it would be more fun to make an adventure game.  And so I repurposed November as Make a Game Month.  Every day, for thirty days, I would develop a bit of the mechanics, the artwork, the music, or the plot structure of the game.  After thirty days, it might not be perfect but it would be a playable game and I could share it with friends.

When I told my friends about this, it turned out that a few of them were doing the exact same thing.  More still were inspired by the idea, and it’s kind of in the process of snowballing into something amazing.

Want to join in?  Here’s how!

Rules:

  1. Between 1st November and 30th November, make a game.  Any sort of game.
  2. On 1st December, let someone else play your game.
  3. A winner is you.

(National Novel-Writing Month has a lot more rules than we do.  This doesn’t really make as much sense with games, so we suggest you think of your own rules to stick to, to reach the best game you reckon you can make in thirty days.  If you want to bounce ideas off other people, there are suggestions below for places to do that.)

Stuff that isn’t rules:

  1. Click the reply button below, and tell us what you’re going to make!
  2. Sign up and chat on the hacklab-discuss mailing list.  Tell us about the game you’re going to make, tell us how you’re getting on, ask questions, send us pictures when you’re finished, find beta testers, whatever you like.
  3. Tweet using the hashtag #makgammon.
  4. Come along to the Edinburgh Hacklab on the 1st of December at 5pm to show off your game, and play other people’s.
  5. It can be any sort of game, the fact that I am making a computer game myself is purely coincidental.  Make a card game, a roleplaying game, a music game, whatever might entertain you.
  6. The only prize is the game that you made, though if more than five people are likely to show up on 1st December I might get some badges made.
  7. You can give it to someone for Christmas.

Make a game, play it.  What’s not to like about that?

9 thoughts on “Make a Game Month – #makgammon

  • Tom Joyce and I will cheat slightly and use Make Game Month to finish off a Game we been working on (and off) since July. So it will be neither personal, nor in a month. It will be a card game. At the moment it’s greek mythology, but maybe we can restyle it to Hacklab themed. I think it be exciting to have an cards like “Visit from Gandalf” or “Wrath of Aaron”, haha. I counter your Bennett with a Ling + Laser cutter. Mahaha. Its really great in my head so lets see if that plays out :p

    Oh yeah it should be internet playable too.

    woot! See you all in a months time!

  • I’m also cheating slightly in that I’ve already written a couple of hundred lines of code for my game, but I will use this month to get it finished, or at least working.
    It will be a browser-based, tile-graphicsed roguelike-like along the lines of the various attempts in the 80s and 90s to make graphical roguelikes for 8- and 16-bit consoles (Dragon Crystal and Fatal Labyrinth are the ones I had.) My target for the end of the month is to have a roughly feature-complete retroclone of Dragon Crystal, or what I can remember of it, plus whatever else I make up. In the future I may be able to use this as a basis for a proper RPG with an overworld and a plot (a la “Rings of Power” for the Megadrive).

  • I will cheat slightly and use make a game month.Its very interesting.Wow its fantastic game and it is nice internet playable game.Everyone see that game.

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