I have recently switched from being a full-time employee from a company for the last decade and a half to running my own consultancy services company. It has been great so far. I’ve been able to focus on some of my passions like creating video games and creating content for folks to consume around video game creation.

But running your own business also comes with some challenges. Having a steady paycheck every two weeks for the last 20 years is comforting. Not knowing exactly where the next project will come from and how the next month’s bills will be paid takes a little bit of a mind shift. Due to this mind shift, I decided to make my wife a game instead of buying her a card. It was sort of a geeky thing to do, but my wife has come to expect the geeky ways I express myself.  (When we were in college, I’d send 3.5 floppy disks to her through the college mail system for her to run different applications I had made. These included instructions like, “on the DOS prompt enter iloveyou.exe”. Yes, she can’t say she didn’t know what she was getting into!)

The Valentines Day Game

Anyway, even though I haven’t changed my cheesy ways all that much in 20 years, the technology has. Unity 3D makes it really simple to get something going. I spent about 2 hours getting the Valentines Day game to work as I wanted to.

The game is simplistic and randomly puts candy inside of the 3 heart boxes. It plays one of 3 random songs when it starts and tapping on the flowers makes it switch songs. If you find the candy on the first try, you get 3 points. If you find it on the second try, you get 2 points. If you didn’t find it until the last box, you get no points and you get a strike. If you get three strikes the game is over. It also keeps track of the high score and updates the screen (and storage) if a high score is achieved during the gameplay.

The game won’t win any awards to be sure, but it was fun to do over the course of a couple of hours this past weekend.

If you haven’t tried out Unity yet, I’d highly suggest you give it a try. It is really easy to get into and after a little bit of a learning curve, you can be creating awesome games – even a Valentines Day game like this one.

The game in its current form is using a font that is only licensed for personal use and I’m using songs that I have rights to listen to, but not to redistribute.  So I’m not releasing the game’s source in it’s current state.

That being said, if getting your hands on this Valentines Day game is something that interests you, please let me know in the comments below. If I get 20 comments asking for the files, I’ll spend some time to rework the game with assets I can actually distribute and make it available to download. So if you want to see it, let me know (and let others know too so they can comment as well.)

A fellow game developer, and friend of mine, Charles Humphrey, recently asked on Facebook:

What do you consider a game to be?

His purpose, I believe in asking this, was to start a conversation around game design. What is fun? What is a game?

Game Design

I’ve been working on a talk I’ll be February 11th around Game Design.

Because of this, I’ve been re-reading two great books on game design:

The Art of Game Design – A Book of Lenses

Introduction to Game Design, Prototyping and Development

A lot of smart people have tried to define game.

“[A game is] an interactive structure of endogenous meaning that requires players to struggle toward a goal.”  – Greg Costikyan

Endogenous basically means, things that have value in the game, only have value in the game.

Another, more scientific, definition is

“Games are an exercise of voluntary control systems, in which there is a contest between powers, confined by rules in order to produce a disequilibrial outcome.” – Elliot Advedon and Brian Sutton-Smith

 

Here is a summarized statement about what a game is from the Art of Game Design:

Games are entered willfully, have goals, have conflicts, have rules, can be won or lost, are interactive, have challenge, can create their own internal value, engage players, are closed, formal systems, and are a problem-solving activity.

I think, this is why many developers like playing games. In general, we like solving problems.

Do you like playing games? If so, why do you like playing games?

Let me know in the comments below!