The 4th Hour

Written by Michael Manning

Can you make a game in 4 hours? Well we couldn't, but here's how far we got...

Darren and I set out at 9.30pm to see what we could do with WYSIWYG game development platform Construct in just 4 hours. I was handling the construct side while Darren was painting assets with pixels. Our intention is not to show how ‘easy’ programs such as Construct can be, but to show how intuitive and design-led they are. The fact that in just a few hours you can prototype an idea to a functioning and tweak-able state is quite remarkable and is a taste of the future of software development.

Here’s a time-lapse video of the 4 hour session, sped up into 2mins for your viewing pleasure:

The task we set on ourselves was to start from a completely blank canvass, not even with an idea of what to do or even how to do it. I am quite familiar with Construct myself but there is always much more to learn. We wanted to see how much of a game we could hammer out and then post it online; if we had nothing then we’d post just that. In the end we had almost one level to a platform-shooter, three different enemy types, parallax scrolling and some minor detail elements and some particle effects. To help speed up asset creation we worked in 256x164 resolutions and based our ideas off a Google image we found of a city silhouetted by a sunset. We spent much of our time creating the background elements and core mechanics, so much time that the final hour was a desperate struggle to do some speed-programming putting enemies in the game, giving them health and attack patterns, giving the player a death and level restart…My hands moved like Lt Data’s and my brain turned into a thin, cheese-like substance.

‘Draw a character with three frames of animation,’ I say to Darren thirty minuets before the end. I had forgotten that the placeholder white rectangle I was using to represent the player character wasn’t going to cut it so Darren, never having animated did his best to trace over a Megaman sprite which I then hastily loaded into Construct and tried to half-remember how to sequence animations…The end result was a continuous loop of what looks like Megamans unfortunately mutated, handicapped brother, hopping desperately on a inexplicably hot surface with a banana up his arse. But, we had no time to correct the issue which is unfortunate because the inaccuracy of the sprites means that he literally hops every other step meaning that jumping is sometimes unresponsive as you may try to jump in the middle of his natural hop, Cest La Vie. Other glaring problems are that at the end the ship is supposed to take off and leave the screen triggering a jump to a game over screen but something is blocking the ships path so all that happens is that Mega-Gimp turns invisible but the player can still control him.

I am glad that we put in the nod to Canabalts falling buildings and I do quite like the super low-res city aesthetic with the layers forcing a parallax scroll, and the hover cars…and the pace is quite good but this is four hours work, after 4 weeks we could potentially have something quite decent. So there, first hand proof at the quality of Constructs ability to rapidly prototype ideas by negating the need for laborious scripting and by giving the developer a very neat drag-and-drop design interface. It’s only going to get better too, as Scirra, Click Team, YoYo Games and whoever else are developing new software like this learn more about how to give the user more freedom and control without sacrificing the core principles of design led programming and development.

You can download Construct here: www.scirra.com

Perhaps you want to give the 4hour challenge a go yourself? Send us your game to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it section of our site and we’ll add it to the article.