Pick a game you can finish in a weekend

You believe the idea is the hard part, and that belief is what eats the weekend. The idea arrives as a world rather than a game, with a map, characters with backstories, and an economy. It gets a name and a logo. The weekend goes on the document, and the document cannot be played by anyone.

Naming it first is the same failure wearing better clothes. It feels like work and it produces a file nobody can open. The name is the last decision, not the first.

I build most things with AI doing the construction. A browser tycoon game called Food Truck Park Tycoon shipped out of the small studio I run, and it plays in a browser.

The rules

One screen. No title card, no menu, no settings panel, no second scene, so the player lands and the game is already happening. Every screen you add is a transition to build, a state to track and a place for the thing to break. You will not be looking.

One verb. Click, drag, press one key, type one word. Everything else is a consequence of that one action. Two verbs is not twice the work but the work squared, because now you have to decide what happens when they collide.

One loop, and it fits in one sentence. Say what the player does and why they do it again, in one sentence. If you cannot, you do not have a game yet. You have a setting.

No multiplayer. Not two players on one keyboard, not a leaderboard, not a share code. The moment a second person is in the design you have a server, an identity problem and a cheating problem. None of them is the game.

No save system. The game starts fresh every time it is opened. Saving means storage, versions, corrupted states and a whole afternoon on the part of the product that nobody enjoys building and nobody notices working.

No art pipeline. Rectangles, circles, text, four colours. Not a sprite sheet, not an animation tool, not a font you downloaded, not a friend who said he would do the art next week.

Do it now

Write five things you know far too much about. Your job, a hobby, a grievance, a thing you explain to people at parties until they leave. Be specific. Not "football", but the fortnight of the transfer window.

Turn each one into a verb by finding the single physical action inside it. Pricing becomes set a price, a queue becomes serve the next person, and a rota becomes place someone in a slot.

Take each verb through the six rules above. Most will die at the second rule, and that is the rule doing its job rather than the idea being poor.

Then write the brief. Exactly this, nothing more:

GAME:        <ten words, no name yet>
THE VERB:    <the one thing the player does>
THE LOOP:    <one sentence: they do X, Y happens, so they do X again>
IT ENDS:     <the condition that stops the game>
IT LOOKS:    <four colours and what each one means>
NOT IN IT:   <three things you are refusing to build>

That last line is the one people skip. Fill it in. Writing down what you are refusing is the only thing that stops you building it at two in the morning.

A worked example

Say you teach geography at a secondary school. You have two free weekends and you have never made a game. Your list of five turned up cliffs, rivers, the exam timetable, the staffroom rota and fieldwork in the rain.

Cliffs gave you the verb. A walker on a cliff path steps aside as a rock comes down. One key does it.

GAME:        Dodge falling rocks on a cliff path by switching lanes
THE VERB:    Press space to step into the other lane
THE LOOP:    They step aside, the rock misses and the next one falls faster, so they step again
IT ENDS:     A rock hits the walker
IT LOOKS:    grey = cliff, brown = rock, yellow = walker, white = score
NOT IN IT:   real cliff names and maps, an erosion quiz between rounds, a class leaderboard

No name yet. That comes last.

The failure you will hit

The idea will get better while you are writing it. It always does. A twist will arrive. A second mechanic will appear, it will be genuinely good, and you will add it because typing it costs you nothing at that moment.

It costs the weekend. Put it under NOT IN IT and carry on, because the good ideas you refused are the only reason anything ever ships.

Not for you if

You want to build the game you have been describing to people for three years. That one is too big for a weekend and this step will only annoy you.

Step two turns the idea into a loop before anything gets drawn. The Vault is the paid library for anything further.