Originally posted to Cohost on 2024/08/13.
I had hoped this would be a little more eloquent, but I've ended up falling sick so bear with me.
Today, August 13th, marks the end of a journey of a little over a year. What I have to present at the end of it all is an adaptation of The Game of the Goose for Panic's Playdate.
I've learned a lot about proper game development while working on this project, so if you're a Playdate owner and a centuries old boardgame sounds like your thing, feel free to visit the Catalog page, and if you'd like to read more about the game itself and a few of the insights I've picked up from this project, keep reading under the cut. If you came here from Catalog, what's up dude? Great to see you here.
I've got plenty of other ideas I'd like to put together and a couple of projects already in the works, but for now I'm glad to have one game done.
About The Game of the Goose
For many years my family and I have been researching and playing period games at the Renaissance Festivals our reenactment group is part of. We've had the opportunity to learn about a great many obscure games, some of which have begun reappearing in popular culture over the years, and among my family's collection of historical board, card, and dice games, this game in particular is one of our favorites.
The Game of the Goose is a roll-and-move racing game which dates back as far as 15th century Italy and has been actively played across the western world ever since, albeit with increasing obscurity. Exact boards vary, being that the game was made long before creating and selling your own copy of an existing game was frowned upon, but the main concept remains the same across the game's many iterations: rolling two dice at a time and advancing or being set back by landing on special spaces, players compete to be the first to land on space 63 by exact count. Being a game of pure chance it can be played and enjoyed by anyone who can roll dice and count up to six at a time, and we've had great success allowing an arbitrary number of players to join and leave the table at any time during the game.
While the printing press was made famous by the ability to mass-produce books, the most notable example being the Bible, it was made profitable by products such as The Game of the Goose. Owing to the newfound ability to create a single engraved plate and mass-produce identical illustrations for cheap, The Game of the Goose was one of the first, if not the first, board games to ever be commercially mass-manufactured. The particular illustration used in this adaptation is the oldest known surviving board to have been made and sold in England, originally printed by John Overton sometime around 1670. Anyone could pick up a copy of the game from one printer or another for no more than two pence (roughly in the lane of $3 at the time of writing), with all the rules printed directly on the board and nothing more needed than a pair of dice and some tokens, and it quickly became a very popular gambling and courting game.
In terms of modern equivalents, the closest matches would be Candyland or Chutes and Ladders. The game is entirely determined by chance, and most of the enjoyment comes from the fact that the players can be expected to go through a long series of ups and downs before one eventually wins. The negative spaces (mostly) don't prevent you from playing for more than a couple of turns, and the positive spaces are (mostly) easy enough for other players to catch up with, with the extremes weighted towards either end of the board, so players will find themselves almost neck-and-neck more often than not. Even when one player is all the way at the start and the other is nearly to the end, you can't predict which one will win with any real certainty.
About Making The Game of the Goose
There are many things that can't be easily put into words about the experience of making and selling a game, and I can't be sure my experience is universal to begin with. I'd encourage anyone interested in making a game to simply begin making one, and anyone who's already making a game to keep going. You'll learn more by doing than you could by reading what I've done.
With that said, here are a few important things I've picked up from working on my first game of any substance:
- Keep a to-do list, and keep it updated regularly. If you need to, split the items into smaller steps or rewrite the entire list from scratch. A project like this can feel daunting when it's all sitting in your head, but as soon as it's laid out methodically on paper the entire thing feels much smaller and easier to handle. I wrote many to-do lists across the development of this game, and between features which were slowly crossed out and small steps which could be completed in no time flat, the finish line practically snuck up on me. Before I knew what happened, it was done.
- Just keep checking off your to-do list a little at a time. I can't say with certainty whether a year is a long or a short time to be working on a game of this size, but I'm sure it would have been much faster if I was better at keeping up the momentum. The hardest periods of development were the ones where I had put it down for some time, whether because I was focusing on a different project briefly or because real life got in the way, and I had to pick it back up and start again. Even a few lines of code, a single asset, or a little planning can help you keep going.
- Working with premade assets helps a lot. Working with a style and limitations helps just as much. You should usually begin with programmer art whenever practical and fill in your final assets afterwards, but being able to chunk up a pre-existing image for the bulk of my art made putting in the final assets as I went a fairly simple task. Having to fit my original assets within two colors and the regions of the screen I'd already selected for them made creating those easy as well. If you've got a big game that's likely to change in development I wouldn't recommend this approach, but for a gamejam game or a recreation/port like this it's satisfying to watch the entire thing steadily come together into the final shape.
- Keep your code organized and readable. No matter what engine you're using or what form your code is in, this is universal advice. When I created the game logic it was a single pass of pure text I/O, and the majority of my development time was spent slowly patching in animations and fixing up holes and bugs. You will need to read and re-read your code often. Make it easy to remember where everything is, so when you need to add something halfway between starting the turn and rolling the dice you know exactly what line it needs to go on.
- Coroutines are your friend. Being able to split a linear code across several frames makes everything and anything related to animations and timing easier to write. Coroutines are one of my favorite things about writing code in Lua.
- Use version control. You don't know panic until your hard drive dies on you in the middle of development and you're not sure how well you can recover it. And I don't know panic like that either because I had a git repository with most of the project history in it, and I simply laid the files I scraped off the dying disk back onto it to get the last few unsaved changes.
The thing I'm most proud of is the sound effects. Those are real dice, rattling around in a cardboard tube and being knocked into each other on top of a semi-firm book. Sampling real sounds is both fun and practical, and while you do need a decent microphone for it I greatly recommend it.
The single biggest piece of advice I can give to any prospective or practicing game developers is, again, just do it. I wasn't sure I could pull this off the way I wanted when I started, and it didn't look very good for a long while. Keep the vision in your mind and slowly keep pushing towards it, and you'll get there before you know it.
It's just like visual art: you begin with the roughest sketch possible and progressively polish it up, just a little bit at a time, until you have a finished piece. And every time you do that it gets a little easier. The experts, the guys who've been doing this for years and years, make it look easy. You might look at the beautiful and detailed finished painting and think "I'd never be able to do that," but you can. It might take a little longer than you expected, but you just have to keep practicing and iterating. And just like with art, there's a lot of charm in pieces that look kind of wacky and imperfect. So just get out there and make some art.
