When most programmers are faced with developing a game from the ground up in four days, they go for a simple concept like a 2D shoot-'em-up or platformer. When Benjamin Nietschke and Cristoph Rienacker make a game in four days, they go for broke, aiming for a 3D, first-person multiplayer dungeon crawl that would take most people weeks if not months to develop. "When we heard about a four-day development competition, we thought we could do something simple, but that wouldn't be as cool," Nitschke explained.
Nitschke has some experience doing big games quickly. Last year, he built an entire racing game in a month just because they "wanted to prove we could do it." With Reinacker handling the art and Nitschke handling the heavy coding, Dungeon Quest is already showing some impressive texture and lighting effects in a fully navigable, if empty, world after just a day and a half of work.
By Thursday the pair hopes to add monsters with artificial intelligence and a split-screen two-player mode, but they admitted that the focus would be more on the graphics than the gameplay. "We don't care much about the competition," Nietschke said. "We just want to get it finished." Click on to see what they've got so far after the jump.
