Game a Week: Week 34

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Idea

The last few weeks have been busy and have left me feeling particularly drained. Ramadan has altered my daily schedule in an interesting way, contract work has been eating up a lot of my time, and the spare time I had left this week was spent with friends who were visiting.  In order to stick with my Game a Week goals and not utterly destroy myself, I decided to create a game that was just silly.

It’s no secret that I find farts hilarious.  I think Louis C.K. described it best when he said that you don’t have to be smart to laugh at a far, but you’d be stupid not to.  Nine times out of ten, a fart is purely hilarious – however, every now and again, a situation arises where you need to fart and you have no safe space to do so.  Whether it be a nice restaurant or in a church or surrounded by people you don’t know and/or respect – there will some day be a situation in which you can’t fart.  And that is when you will need to fart the most.

I decided to translate this experience into a game where you are stuck in a crowded room with no way to escape. The pressure inside of your bowels builds until you just can’t hold it in anymore – unless you are able to discretely release your toots.

What went right

Everything. There is nothing about this game that didn’t go right. I love farts, and I just spent the last few days making a game about farts and looking up fart sound effects and programming functions such as ReleaseBigFart() in scripts titled Fart. I wanted to make a game that would bring me joy and help me feel more relaxed (instead of stressed out with the pressure to finish something), and I accomplished that goal by about a million percent.

I think that this game fairly accurately captures the experience that I was going for and creates some nice tension between releasing little farts when you can, and bigger farts when you need to (all while running away so as to not be detected as the flatulence culprit).

This game was meant to simply make me happy – and it did.

What went wrong

This may be the first week where I legitimately can just say that nothing went wrong. If I wanted to nitpick, I would have spent more time coloring the characters in the crowd (as it is now, I just replaced a bunch of colors – and kind of poorly), but other than that, this game is exactly what I wanted it to be.

What I learned

You don’t have to take yourself seriously. I already knew this, but it’s a good lesson to be reminded of.  I spent the last few weeks placing a strange amount of pressure on myself to creating something “great” and “real” and I could feel it draining every last ounce of motivation and creativity out of me. Sometimes creating things can just be fun and silly and dumb, and that’s okay. Make whatever it is you want to make.