Since late 2024, I've shared five little games on Glorious Trainwrecks, a site I've adored for a long time. The intent was to embrace "sketch gamedev," to slam out tiny games in a few hours a-piece. I've enjoyed many games made in this mode by others. I thought posting on the site, which is all about this spirit of playful experimentation, would help me enter it myself. (Glorious Trainwrecks is also a creative crucible that helped forge many of my all-time favorite freeware devs. In my arrogance, I thought contributing to the site would help my own light shine similarly bright.)
I failed miserably at my goal. I did successfully slam out a couple games in a day or two each. Then the third one took a week. Then the fourth and fifth ones took multiple weeks spread out over several months each. Ah well.
The first game was Broccoli, a tiny RPGMaker 2003 "horror" game. I made it the same way I've continued approaching flash fiction for our local writer's club. I generated ten random words on this site, picked two ("broccoli" and "horror"), then made a game. I got the bulk of it down in 2-3 hours, then polished it up and posted it the next day. I consider this a Success in terms of "embracing sketch dev," and if I'd continued with this approach I'd be writing a different blog post.
A little before Christmas last year, I released Action Sketches on itch. It collects the remaining four games I released on Glorious Trainwrecks, all action games made in Love2d. (My favorite is probably Danse Macabre, made in about a week, but I like all of them.)
If I really wanted to make sketch games, I needed to use easy tools I'm comfy with like RPGMaker, Bitsy, or Twine. I'm still very much a newbie when it comes to coding games from scratch, and making even simple games in Love takes me a long time. I did learn a lot about how I like organizing and building games on the back-end, and I feel much better equipped to tackle other projects in the future. So, still a win ultimately, even if I didn't turn out a whole feast of games like I wanted.
There's one more "problem" that got in the way of me making sketch games. Every single one of these I put out, friends immediately jumped in, live-posted them, and said nice things to me. I have an intensely supportive peer group of artist friends; I want to reward their care and attention with competent, enriching art. That's an extra bit of self-imposed (and obviously optional!) pressure that makes it harder to just throw something together, to not worry endlessly about whether it "works" or not.
I want to keep experimenting with quicker modes of creation (in addition to longer form works, of course). I might try approaching it like I have my flash fiction, mostly keeping it to myself and a few close peers, then releasing a collection of works I particularly like all at once. Or maybe I'll get over myself and post a bunch of art on Glorious Trainwrecks (or elsewhere) again. My friend sraëka has been doing that on itch for the last few months and they're having a lovely time.
It was a good experiment. I've been at this in earnest for thirteen years; I think I'm finally figuring out what I want my art practice to look like, one teeny tiny step at a time.
I definitely feel that bit of like, "if it's not going to be amazing why would I bother releasing it"? People's time is so finite that I always have to fight that. I do find I usually succeed but it's a skill that I've seen plenty of people besides you and I have to develop, too.
ReplyDeleteI really like the term "sketch games". I haven't made them a part of my practice for many years at this point (which was probably an overcorrection for making them my entire personality for so long, haha) but I still think they're incredibly valuable.
ReplyDeleteI really think the tendency to hide your sketches is counterproductive, _especially_ from supportive peers, because they are the ones that will be the most understanding of what a quick doodle is and is not. And I think the one of the things that is so fascinating about sketch games is how _completely_ impossible it is to make one that feels quite like anyone else's! You don't have time to overthink things and polish out the rough edges of the work, and those rough edges turn out to be your fingerprints. They kind of inherently reveal things about your unique perspective and process that you maybe aren't even consciously aware of. They become this beautifully human and personal artifact.
There's a game in the very first Pirate Kart, from back in 2007, called "Zombie In Space!". It consists of a starfield background, with the earth in the middle, and a large Klik & Play clipart zombie. There is a visible score, labelled "Brains", which is zero. You move the zombie around the screen with the arrow keys. Nothing else happens. As I recall, the zombie doesn't even change the way it's facing based on the direction of movement.
At the time, I genuinely wrestled with this game! I had an impulse to say, no. C'mon. There's nothing here. I can't put this in the collection. You need to try a little harder than this.
And then I thought, well, how could I possibly tell this poor stranger, who took the time out of their life to show up for my last-minute terrible game jam, to put themselves out there, that their game is too terrible to include? Why did I feel like this wasn't enough?
Slowly I realized that there _was_ something there. The author had an idea and had made something out of it, with the skills they had and in the time they had given themselves. Whether it met my expectations or even the author's wasn't the point; it was a human artifact, with its own personality, that was genuinely like nothing else in the Kart. Of _course_ it had to go in. Of _course_ it was worth celebrating.
(Here I must acknowledge that it's entirely possible that its total lack of functionality was an intentional joke that I completely missed at the time. It _is_ pretty funny in hindsight. In the words of the screenshot captioner that submitted the Pirate Kart to Mobygames: "you cannot deny that this zombie is in space.")
I looked at the other games in that collection, and I realized that they _all_ had their own personality. That even though many of the games used exactly the same stock K&P assets, and were built from exactly the same set of stock K&P behaviours, they were all startlingly unique. When you dash off a small sketch, you can't help but imbue it with some unfiltered part of yourself, and that's such a gift. For me, it's a big piece of what art's _for_. I've never taken it for granted since.
What a lovely thoughtful comment, thanks so much Jeremy! Means a lot coming from you obv!
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