Introduction

In my head, I find myself at a door. I move my hand up to the door to knock. I pause. I try again. My hand finally connects.

The door opens and I see a sleazy man leering at me. He looks me over. “You wanna make a game, huh?” He is laughing at me in his eyes even though his face doesn’t show it.

I nod.

His whole body shakes now. It’s that funny to him. He finally recovers and allows me to enter the room.

There is a crowd of people behind him I didn’t notice before. As I pass over the threshold, I see the ever-growing collection of others, those who call themselves Game Developers. In corner is a sign hanging over a smaller group. I head over.

When I reach the it, I read it again: “Indie Developer.” I know that I have found my place.

For a long time, I wanted to make video games.  And, for an even longer time, this dream of making games went unfulfilled.

At the end of last year, 2011, I made a decision that 2012 would be different for me. I wanted to start making things happen and I made plans to start doing some of the things I always wanted to pursue. Thus, my year-long project Game-A-Month in 2012.

Two Decorate is my first game from that project.

The various clothing choices in Two Decorate

Goals

I knew that I wanted a game with simple mechanics. I wanted a possibility space that was constrained by a limited number of verbs and nouns, yet I framed the story in such a way to allow numerous interpretations. I chose the theme of decorating for that reason: the nouns would have to be furniture and the verbs actions against those objects. Colors though would have to be personally resonate to the player as they tried to match whatever their in-game partner wanted in the room.

When I sat down to work out a design for this month, I knew that I wanted to construct a game around wanting to please someone else. It’s an innate part of every one of us. We want to please others. I thought, then, that it would make an interesting game concept to base it arranging furniture, picking colors and then tying all options to trying to please a partner.

Countdown and Annoyance information

The frustration of limited feedback would provoke the player. That was what I thought would happen. They would, hopefully, put more time into the game to figure out one of several answers. They would try various combinations and eventually find one that worked. That was the theory anyway. In practice, it lead to some interesting solutions from players.

Problems

I had most of the game done about halfway through the month. Around January 15th, I had all of the major mechanics working but was fighting with an issue I am, as of this writing, still trying to fix: if you pick up an object, you can pass it through the walls.

That was the solution several of the play-testers came up with after I released it into the wild. Once they had picked up an object, they would walk to the edge of the room and simply push it out. Neither walls, nor couch, would hold them back and they could place objects outside the room with ease. Within a few seconds of starting, they could clear the room and just wait for the timer to run out.

As I mentioned, I still have not fixed that. I think I know how to solve the problem but it would mean a major rewrite of all of the code from the ground up, something I’ve decided I am not going to do.

This was my first game of the year. I’m going to let it stand, warts and all. I’ll just learn from it and improve the process in the next one. Because, there will be a next one. And a next one.