Making Metagun

First, congratulations! I would demystify the process of creation. Show them your wireframes, your pencil sketches, talk about the business v. creative push and pull. Make it interactive - break them into groups of 2-3 each for 5 min and show them Notch's time-lapse in the background on projector while you have them work on exercises in ideation - what would their game be? what would the levels, characters, and challenges be. They don't have to present - just get them comfortable with the first step of creation - putting it on 'scratch' paper. If you have time, deconstruct Flappy Bird. The scrolling left to right background v. making the bird move. How the object detection is greatly simplified when you have only one coordinate to detect (y-bird and y-pipeTop/y-pipeBottom). How adding gravity to the bird (downward velocity) allows you to fly the bird. "Making Metagun" by Notch ▶ this video "Creating Prelude of the Chambered" by Notch link

Notch's Ludum Dare video for Metagun ( ▶ this video ) was inspiration for a series of scripts I now use for clients and my own entertainment purposes (for some loose definition of "entertainment"). It's a series of shell scripts I use that screencap videos of coding and set them to music (so, for example, rendering a 48-hour coding competition to a 5-minute song, or as I more typically do for clients, render the development process down to a few minutes for them to watch in fast-time how their development was done). It's called watchmecode ( link ) and I just have to do ./make-av-video.sh /path/to/video.mpg /path/to/song.mp3 And it does the rest, and outputs it to "done.mp4" The result is something that looks like this: link (disclaimer, I've plugged this before on HN: link )

Watching `notch` live-code is also very popular. [1]: ▶ this video Making Metagun [2]: link Making MiniCraft [3]: link

So basically, premature optimization sucks. Don't search for a solution of a problem that doesn't exist. If you spend lots of time writing the same code: optimize that. If you dont do that, dont optimize it. I think lots of people belive that its some kind of magic that made Sergey, Larry and all the other successful programmers successful. ▶ this video <-- There you got productivity by Notch (Minecraft creator for those who dont know). Its like three seconds of twitter, 30 minutes for food and some sleep, for a total of 48h. Actually that makes me take back the idea of the magical thing, since the magic seems to be complete dedication to the task you are supposed to do.