I recently decided to write a simple game (a really simple game) partly out of curiosity and partly because I'm tired of not finishing my bigger projects.  A full time job and pet projects really don't mix well - I tend to get home from a hard day of programming and look at my home computer and think "bleh".

The inspiration for this comes partly from an article I once read from a guy who tried to write a game in one weekend.  My goal was different - I wanted a working game which I could add features to when I felt like it, to use as a kind of canvas for new ideas.  His guiding principle, however, was very similar to mine - from the list of things outstanding on the todo list, take the one which brings you closest to a playable product and do that one first.  My other rule, which I found very dificult to stick to, was to write only what was required for the first iteration of the game, rather than writing generic reusable code that does things I don't need yet.  In doing this, I am relying on my code being well enough written that I can simply refactor it when necessary.  The goal here is to have a playable game as soon as possible because it makes adding code to it more fun.

A playable game can be launched, it can end normally, it can end because you decide to quit, and a new game can be started.  It has either an achievable victory condition or a score, and it has the possibility of defeat.  It exits cleanly when you have finished.

I've chosen the lightfeather engine as a basis for the game.  Everything else is written from scratch in C++.  The genre is the snake / tron style games that we ancient ones remember from the days of old.

I recorded the time spent on it, and the first version which met the criteria of "playable" above took a total of:

4.5 hours messing with lightfeather (because I choose to work on the latest dev branch instead of a stable release)

6.2 hours on artwork and models (and it shows - this isn't my strong point)

38.2 hours coding (about 1 working week, of which 5 hours were spent tracking down 1 memory leak - grrrr)

The time above was spread out over about 1 month, however, because I really do find it that hard to care about it when I get home from work.

Here are some screenshots, oldest first (so you can see the progression):

There is a download link at the top of this page, and it appears to work.  It is, obviously, not very well tested, and all downloads are at your own risk with all the usual disclaimers.  I promise that it is not intentionally malicious in any way.  It's only a toy at the moment, but it is a really good choice for something I can simply add features to - there are a lot of possibilities - if I add enough of them it will not only be playable, but worth playing :)