Keep Making Games

Keep Making Games starts you in 1976 with a spare room, a homebrew kit and $4,000. Make a small game, ship it, read what the magazines think, then make the next one better. Buzz, Bonsai and Tape will have opinions about all of it. - Snap features onto the genre's core and prototype it before you commit - Ship onto three shelves at once: its genre, its theme and its machine. A flooded shelf sells less, whoever flooded it - Get reviewed by the magazines of the day. They don't agree, and each one says why - Buy a rival's game, then play it or take it apart - Master a genre and it opens two more - Action grows into Platformer and Shoot 'em up Making a game Every game starts as a genre's core. Snap features onto it, sketch a prototype and see what it really costs before you build the rest. Then the game gets made right there in the room, while Buzz reads you the headlines. Your only staff After your first release you pick one of them. Buzz is a chick with a megaphone for a beak. Bonsai is a small tree in a pot. Tape is a cassette with strong opinions about hardware. The other two move in when you earn them. Each wants something different from your next game, and they'll tell you. Each one also evolves twice: Tape becomes a floppy disk and won't stop mentioning how fast it loads. Shelves Every genre, theme and machine is its own shelf, and rival studios fill them too. Release a Space game the same month as three others and it sits in a pile. Good games make players trust a shelf more, which helps you and every rival on it. Your first goal is simple: beat the best Action game on sale. You study them, they study you Buy a rival's game and pick one: play it and learn from people who know the genre better than you, or take it apart so every technology inside gets cheaper to research. Old games sit in the bargain bin at half price. It works both ways. Master a genre and it opens two new ones, like Platformer and Shoot 'em up from Action. Get there first, and rivals have to play and take apart your games before they can follow. The news tells you when they have.