In his article <a>Game A Week: Getting Experienced At Failure</a> Rami Ismail of Vlambeer advices aspiring developers to create high volume of small weekly games. Start on Monday, finish on Saturday, move to the next one, go! What’s the point? I don’t know how to make good games and want to learn that skill through extensive practice.

The idea for Deathball Tornament was inspired by Wizorb, disc wars from Tron: Legacy and Juice it or lose it - a talk by Martin Jonasson & Petri Purho. I wanted to take not a Breakout, but a simple Pong game this time, and to add some twist and juiciness to it. It is a deadly sport between 2 cyborg opponents, who hurl a deadly crushing ball around arena. I also planned to make energy meters and some neat “magic” tricks to spice things up.

What went right: The Ball! I wanted it to feel mighty, strong and deadly, and I think I succeeded. When I made low droning and bouncing sounds, I then spent several days just playing with this thing even without any graphics. It felt so good, so satisfying, that I couldn’t stop toying with it.

Then come graphics. Actually, it’s the best thing about this game. At least I can put a nice sci-fi tileset in my pixel portfolio for future boasting.

What went wrong: The same mistake again: I made graphics instead of a game. I tend to spend too much time pixelling stuff. Some of them aren’t even used in game.

I tested it on a simple vertical arena first, but had in mind some more interesting levels. And on Saturday when I finally added tileset and made a new layout it was terrible… It was nothing that I imagined. All horizontal walls just caused ball to stuck into environment instead of satisfying play. I simplified it all, and left a few obstacles just to leave something. They don’t really add anything besides demonstrating my pretty tiles.

Then I lost motivation, and wrapped it up on Sunday night just to upload it. Had no desire to implement magic, nothing else. I’m done. Also spent 15 minutes after Sunday midnight (against the rules once again), and didn’t even fix collision bugs.

Lessons learned: I need to stop making pretty graphics! Seriously. I have just a week, not several months to make everything pretty and shiny. Focus on gameplay! I still don’t know about the idea though. It feels good, but I failed to make an interesting game out of it.

But I’m not broken! The whole point is to spend not more than just a week of your life on a failed prototype. Onto the next one, will check back in a week!