On 28 December 2019, a group of four people made a clone of the classic Atari game Indy 500 in an 8-hour game development challenge.
We were able to get a lot of the main features of the game implemented in this short time frame:
- You can drive your car with the keyboard (left and right arrow keys to steer, space key to accelerate).
- The game detects when you've driven off into the dirt and slows you down.
- The game keeps track of how many laps each player has gone.
- The game can tell when a player has completed enough laps to win, and ends the game.
- Particle effects when you leave the track and drive on the dirt.
- AI players that are good, but intentionally variable in skill level so they don't all bunch up.
- Basic rendering for the game.
- A simple menu system that lets you see the main menu, the game in progress, and the credits.
We also had background music working at one point, but then a merge conflict borked it.
While the code is here, in the open, free for people to see what we did, don't judge the quality of the code too harshly:
- It was done by many people, without preemptively deciding on a coding style.
- We all knew it was throwaway code, not something we were going to maintain for the long haul. 8 hours really isn't a lot of time.
- The priority was on getting features working, not on maintainable clean code.
We all believe strongly in the value of clean code, and to a large extent, we stuck to good coding and design practices when making this game. But this is probably not the best example of what code ought to look like, if you want to build on it for days, weeks, or years.