After two hours of working on the game, I came up with an initial minimal draft of the gameplay. You can see it in action here.

Note that the below embedded Javascript grabs the cursor keys which prevents scrolling using the cursor keys for this blog post.

I had the red block objects (which will become ketchup bottles in future iterations) initially function as homing missiles that follow the player, but I couldn’t create an elaborate homing missile object. There’s still a chance to add such a feature later in the game though. For now, the ketchup bottles will just be moved toward to the player for the gameplay. I plan to add noise such as having varying travel speeds and launch times and elaborate travel patterns. I also plan to create hip animations for the ketchup bottles.

As part of the gameplay, I’ll have the player collecting raisins while they try to dodge the incoming ketchup bottles. A new pitch for the game could then be: “dodge ketchup bottles while collecting raisins.” That’s the name of the game, too, Ketchup and Raisins? イケナイコト！. I’ll also include a time elapsed and raisins collected score metric for the gameplay.

Now that I’ve made initial progress, I can better estimate the future, albeit slightly. I plan to devote 1,000 hours total to making the game with 60 hour work weeks, which would mean four months of development time. That seems like a standard and typical software development campaign effort. I hope it doesn’t take something like 2,500 hours, which would be nine months of development time instead.

It’s like leveling up a new character in an MMORPG game with beneficial goals and actions having costs associated with them. Rather than paying the cost of performing five mundane virtual tasks for obtaining a specific reward in an MMORPG game, I will instead be using my time to make parts of the game for the reward of a good, completed game. Playing an MMORPG game for 1,000 to 2,500 hours to level up a character compared to making a game for 1,000 and 2,500 hours seems about right.

Generally, the more time spent, the better the rewards. So that means that I’ll devote a lot of time to making this game, unlike my previous games!