I really miss working on my game hobby projects but realistically don't have the time right now for hours each day what with work and other hobbies. My past projects were all big, ambitious games like an RTS, a driving game/simulator, etc... a whole day's work as I used to do and maybe you refactored your sprite class or improved your level editor.

If you wanted just to be able to throw games together really fast and spend the minimum time on anything that isn't gameplay, what would you do? I'm leaving this open as regards game style, technology/languages, platform... if you wanted every minute to count and you wanted to see a playable game almost from the very start where every hour's work you can see a tangible output...

(I'm a professional developer with a background in games, graphics and business coding so I like to think I'm fairly competent)

I'd grab an engine or game-making program that had already been shown to be capable of creating the kind of game I want, and use that.

I don't think there's an all-purpose answer because the abstract answer is always "get someone else to do the work for you" and the type of work you need to be done depends on the type of game you want to make.

My past projects were all big, ambitious games like an RTS, a driving game/simulator, etc... a whole day's work as I used to do and maybe you refactored your sprite class or improved your level editor.

"Big" is a relative term. Are you saying a 2d game that can be written in a day is what you consider to be "big" ?

If you wanted just to be able to throw games together really fast and spend the minimum time on anything that isn't gameplay, what would you do?

use my in-house game development library or one of my testbed programs that uses it as a start. 3d flight sim with local axis rotations? no problem, got a testbed app ready to go, just copy paste and edit. 3d shooter? same idea. anything less can be trivially thrown together in an hour or two with the library. If i didn't have the library and the sample apps, i'd use an engine appropriate for the type of games i want to make, as Kylotan says.

It's art that scuppers me.

Simply find an existing engine or framework and use it, finding the graphics and sound is the hard bit...

Write a list of gameplay bullet points you want to implement/iterate on.

Build those things. If you need engine code or whatever, write it, but set a 2 hour timer before you start. If your 2 hours is up, stop working on engine code and try and get it to a playable state as soon as possible. If you spend more than an additional 2 hours getting to playable, revisit your priorities.

Sometimes it makes sense to invest in long-term code. Sometimes you can hack together the bare minimum and having a constraint of time will hopefully help you make expedient decisions.


Reserve one (ONE) two-hour "sprint" a week for refactoring and cleanup and documentation. Spend the rest of your time making a game.

It's art that scuppers me.

Simply find an existing engine or framework and use it, finding the graphics and sound is the hard bit...

Yea art takes me quite some time to make as well and it used to be a pain back when I didn't really know much about 3d modeling. In those days I would just download free models off of the Internet to get something up and running.

Don't get me wrong. These days I actually prefer doing just 3d modeling as opposed to actually writing out my game code, but it can take a long time before I get anything up and running, even for a CGI video.

It's art that scuppers me.

Simply find an existing engine or framework and use it, finding the graphics and sound is the hard bit...

For sound, there is a decent selection of royalty free sound out there. It can be kind of tedious to go look for it, and much tweaking still has to be done, but it's there.

Art...not as much, it's not too hard to find free art, which is probably fine for placeholder, a little harder to find royalty free art. A good compromise, if one is already using an engine with an asset store, might be to visit that and buy whatever one needs.

I think it's important to not get too hung up on art or sounds, depending on the game of course, but a game should be fun and playable with sub par art that could be replaced as needed. (Post Kickstarter, or whatever)

I'd grab an engine or game-making program that had already been shown to be capable of creating the kind of game I want, and use that.

IMO engines are great for bigger projects but for something small the overhead of setting it up and learning how it works is non-trivial? That said I've not used the more modern engines, maybe they do let you have something right out of the box?

Where are we at in 2017 regarding game-makers... I recall 10 years ago one of the better 4E4 entrants used GameMaker or something like that. Are they still popular, is there a definitive tool people use or just loads of competing products?

IMO engines are great for bigger projects but for something small the overhead of setting it up and learning how it works is non-trivial? That said I've not used the more modern engines, maybe they do let you have something right out of the box?

Some stats from the global game jam in my region recently - a 48 hour jam (MWU == made with unity):

Learning how it works will slow you down on your first game, but not every game. Also, if you make a lot of small one/two day game projects, then you'll build up a library of common code / prefabs of stuff that you tend to use on each game, such as a simple menu screen, inventory system, pickups, etc...

I'm a big fan of custom game tech, but when I do a game jam, you can be sure as hell that I use Unity so that I can actually get stuff done quickly and have something playable from the first hours of the project.

The other advantage is collaboration with a group of other people who all know the same tech, which may not be relevant to you... but this still kind of applies in that there's a shitload of free/affordable assets that can readily be dropped into your projects.

Unreal, cyringine, unity... those might give the fastests results. The first 3 times: I tried, I failed, and I overreached. I've a bit of experience and this month I managed to make a single thing that's not crap. I think it has to do with practice, and it's not something you could write of, there's a sense of things that needs to be built up (It's not as easy as shamlessfully ignore the ugly and bad).