So Play We All


Category: Biz
Tags: browser games oaqn   so play we all  

Peter Harkins, Jim C. Gadrow, and Luke Hutscal are each building an online game as part of a contest between us. Every week we’ll pick a new area of our games to code on and budget how many hours to spend on it. Every week, someone will be judged to have done the best. Anyone who doesn’t put in the time pays the price by funding the others’ games. Anyone who quits has to delete their entire codebase and all backups.

2011-06-13: We’ve built a website with the current rules and progress updates at So Play We All.

Our Rules

  1. “Fuck it, we’ll do it live.” Games are live as currently developed, even if they suck, starting from “but it’s just a login screen”. Develop on master, develop on prod box if you have to, but don’t hold any code back.
  2. Each week we’ll collectively choose how many hours to spend on our games and a non-mandatory topic. Anyone who doesn’t spend the time (or cheats and spends more) funds the other games by giving a $20 gift card to each other player for game-related expenses (eg. ThemeForest, Linode, AdWords). If you finish early, you rock. Boast a little bit and make the others bow to your awesomeness. (Exception for suiting up: if you have to wear a suit to a funeral, a close family wedding, or a court date, you are allowed to miss that week. No other exceptions, not even dismemberment.)
  3. Deadline is Wednesday at noon GMT to deploy code and publish a blog post, schedule it to make it happen.
  4. A BBGameZone forum poll judges who won that week, 24h window.
  5. By Saturday noon GMT, write a blog post to respond to others’ updates, talk smack, enjoy victory, critique game design, suggest improvements, etc.
  6. Not just OK but encourage to find or buy assets: art, themes, libraries, modules. You can reuse your own pet library as long as it has been released publicly before that week, but outsourcing code is forbidden.
  7. Whoever reaches $10k in profit first wins the contest. But whoever turns their game into a full-time job wins all the bragging rights.
  8. Rules can change by unanimous acclaim.

So say we all. So play we all.

Week 0

We’ve already gotten under way, the goal for our first week was to pick a domain name, set up a blog, and write a blog post describing out game. Here’s my blog post about Oaqn, a game about trading. Please vote for it on bbgz if you’re on the forums.

And here’s Luke’s post and Jim’s post about their games.