#52GameDesignChallenge - The first failure

As those of you who follow me on Twitter are aware, I've started a weekly game design challenge with the intention of designing 52 games in one year. I've also committed to trying to be active on Twitter during the development of each to generally work on my social media skills.

For those who don't follow me on Twitter, by the way, this is a thing I'm doing. This post is about the what should have been the seventh game. And what failing one game means to the challenge overall.


First, the challenge for this game was:

• Mechanic: Movement Programming
• Theme: Hostage and Graveyard
• Victory: Get rid of all your cards
• Constraint: Must have cards with roles

What I sort of came up with but never got playable was a 2 player game where one player was a sort of supervillain who has some hostages in elaborate death traps in a graveyard and the other player plays the police force. The Villian character wants a ransom for the hostages but doesn't want the police to catch him when the ransom is delivered so he will give the bag holder a series of complex instructions with the intention of losing the various police tails. The police meanwhile are trying to predict what the villain ordered the bag holder to do so they can manage to not lose him.

Why did I fail?

A couple of reasons. Several projects that are part of my day (i.e. paying) job reached a point in their development that required an increase in my weekly load. Thus, I ended up having less time after hours for this challenge. Also, minor but important maintenance problems around the house that needed addressing. But primarily, I think I just bit off more than I could chew with that challenge. I don't doubt that I could finish that game given time, but it was just too much for me to do in one week (or week and a half). 

What now?

The question is does failing one game mean I failed the challenge? And I've given that some serious thought and decided that it does not. The challenge is to do 52 games in a year, not to do 52 one week challenges.

So, it is still technically possible that I could complete the challenge. It just got harder since I'll need to do several games in less than a week to catch up. So, that is what I'm going to try to do. I'm not going to explicitly try to do a 4-day game or anything like that, but if I feel like a game is done after 4 days I'm going to release it and start the next challenge rather than waiting until Friday to release.

That said, I'm going to wait until Friday to start the next challenge, which when the next challenge starts I will be two games behind.