Work Breakdown

All three game modes are going to be done in one Flash game, but I broke the release of the game into three separate games. Sure, I could do this game all at once, but I like breaking things into multiple releases. This is not to drag things out (that’s a bonus) but to extend the total amount of time that I have to work on a game. It goes without saying that it takes time to put together a game. By having a game span 3 releases, I am allowing for more time to develop that game. If the time is not needed by that game, then it goes into a game that is taking far longer to complete than originally expected or is put toward one of the large projects that I am working on.

The first release doesn’t need the LCD display, which will save a bit of time. The only thing that is really needed for the first game is the core game and the animations. That being said, putting together 10 animations is a fair bit of work, though thankfully half the sequences have no or minimal animation. Still, extra time that was required to put together this episode was easily justified as the additional work to create the second and third episode was not too overwhelming.

The second game mode is the shifting mode. The work to do this mode is mostly in shifting the doors (a couple of simple functions that shouldn’t [and didn’t] take too long to write) and the LCD display system. Part of the LCD system can be taken from an earlier game that I created for this site. I generally can’t take stuff from work I do for third parties as most of my contracts give them the rights to the work, but Blazing Games owns everything that appears on the Blazing Games site so taking stuff from other games on the site is quite doable.

The final stage of the game is by far the easiest to implement. The actual code to handle the extended game play is just a couple of lines of code. Even before I created the third episode I was well aware how quickly the third mode could be added. To make the third release more worthy, I decided that sound could be added to third version as well. Besides, I recently acquired a palm which has a built in voice recorder, and gathering sounds for the game would be the perfect way of “testing” this feature.

At the same time I was creating the game, I was also roughing out this and the second part of the article. Still to be released is the Open Source version of the game, which will add an exit button to the game so that people can quit the game at any time.