A 10-second game! Inspired by the first in a list of prompts from an RMIT Games class I followed.

This is primarily of interest as a game design study. I decided to go to both extremes and pick “a whole life in 10 seconds” as the theme. Think big! As the player, you get thrown into life, experiencing major events – love, education, making money, toxic relations. When it’s all over (in seconds, mind you!), you will be presented a quick summary of your life.

You can play the result in any desktop browser by clicking on the image below:

The game was implemented in Unity, taking just under two weeks. Here are the props I modeled – reducing a modern human existence to a few essentials:

• phone
• hamster wheel
• coin (small money)
• heart
• book (education)
• dollar bundle (big money)

I had LOTS of ideas for the game, but had to discard almost everything due to the ridiculous time limit. A very worthwhile lesson in scoping and restricting to the bare minimum! For example:

• Free player movement was abandoned in favor of simple lane switching.
• A numeric score display in the corner? There’s no time to even look at it. So I put symbols right below the player avatar.
• I reduced the number of items to just 2 per lane, a “regular” and a “special” item.

Still, there is way too much going on. You probably need to play a few times to even realize how this works 🙂 Which is partly intentional, I wanted to experiment with the feeling of having no control, life speeding up, and not knowing what just hit you. As it stands, I don’t feel it’s too successful a game, but as an exploration off the beaten track, the project was immensely valuable.