The ninety-game game-development gauntlet

When reading the great book Masters of Doom, about the rise of iD Software on the backs of John Romero and John Carmack -- either there or in this interview with Carmack -- I heard that Romero claims to have written 90 games. At one point he would write games for every letter of the alphabet. Carmack wrote one a month.

But 90 games?! Even if you're Shigeru Miyamoto, or Hideo Kojima, and have been in the industry for 30+ years, and even if most of those games are shitty little unsellable projects, or just Flash games, that sounds unfeasible.

Regardless, it's inspiring. Carmack talks to Lex Fridman in that podcast link above about the importance of finishing small projects, and how that can be used to learn things to use in future larger projects. Carmack is also one of the hardest workers in the industry, it seems, being a huge proponent of 60+ hour weeks and, at times in his career, doing 100 hour work weeks.

Personally, I think both of these characters are interesting. There's certainly some self-mythologizing to it, but I think the DOOM duo really did just have the experience to eventually be able to build great things, just because they made so many small projects over the years. At one point, the two of them worked for Softdisk Publishing, making small games and software to put on subscription box floppy disks that were put on at random. You paid $10, got a floppy disk with a few programs on it in the mail, and it was kind of like a surprise bag.

Romero had apparently made replicas of many of the old arcade games like Donkey Kong and Space Invaders, for the Apple II computer. He and Carmack and some buddies also made a replica of Super Mario Bros 3 that they made for PC that they tried to sell to Nintendo under porting license.

They became the talented creators of DOOM and Quake, but I would say a lot of it was just their dedication and how many projects they made.

To the point: He who passes the gauntlet will probably get $1,000,000 simply by developing AAA skills. He who does not, will burn in the fiery anguish of copium.

I'm not a programmer genius. Therefore, I will allow some small exceptions on the skill level of my output. Initially I will allow some projects in that are follow-along tutorials from YouTube or whatever. I will always say if it has been copied from somewhere. I will also not be building my own game engine most of the time. I'll probably use tools like:

  • Twine
  • RPG Maker
  • Unity
  • or: Game Maker Studio

Because I understand that safe spaces breed complacency, in the nature vs nurture sense, I will try to work towards not relying on other people's engines at some point. I may have to build an engine out of C code at some point if that will be the case. However, for now, let's keep it simple.

RPGs will count if they are 5 to 10 minutes long or longer. Most games will count even if they're only 20 seconds long. Even minigames will count. At some point I may just compile the minigames together into minigame compilations since in a way they shouldn't take up a space at a time of the 90 spaces, but for now they'll count. Pretty much anything counts that is longer than 20 seconds. They should all have title screens though.

This isn't even just about videogames. If I can bang a few of these out, it will surely develop some knowledge, through which I can improve at web development as well.

Game #1: Stuck In A Room

Engine: Twine -- Length: 5 minutes so far -- Genre: Text adventure & prison escape

Here's my prototype so far.

Game #2: Chrome dino game

Engine: No engine, just JavaScript -- Length: A minute or two if your timing is bad, otherwise infinite -- Genre: Endless runner

If you've ever tried to use Google Chrome but the internet has been out, you likely will recognize this. I imagine Google put it in there to chill out the person who's pissed about their internet being down. At least they can play this game. Anyways, I followed along with a tutorial by Knife Circus on YouTube here. My prototype is here.

Game #3: Golf Island

Engine: No engine, just JavaScript -- Length: 1 minute -- Genre: Text adventure & golf

A little text-based golf game I thought up. This is the most complicated game I've made in JavaScript yet, at about 300 lines of code between HTML/CSS/JS. Playable here.

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This challenge started on November 11th, 2022, so if I've gone ghost, it's means I'm a little bitch that can't finish the gauntlet. Last updated: December 11th, 2022