“Untitled Adventure Game” is a project made to challenge myself, by keeping the time budget super low. 16 hours to be precise.

It initially started in 2020 as a web-design project for a college JavaScript course I tried to ace.

In 2024 I decided to start over, hoping to challenge my growing familiarity with the hard skills of game development. I gave myself 16 hours for everything, including the programming, art, and any bug squashing.

As per my development philosophy, all work is done by either me or people within my network. This sounds as though it added to the challenge even more, but removed stress as any bugs created I could track down in code I wrote myself.

Since I’m no composer, I got the music “The Leap” from a super talented friend, Denis Borodin.

Time Budget

I first started using time budgets during my time at Tetrascape, to increase project turnaround. I quickly extended this to other disciplines as well. Nowadays it’s a great tool to speed up production for smaller multidisciplinary projects, as it helps understand the exact cost and benefits of my approaches.

Budgeting is great to encourage simplifying work. Simplifying work is great because it means more can be done with less. These limits drive iteration and improvement in areas where I feel skilled enough to take risks.

Timing myself also highlights points to improve later: I wished I could have spend time creating particles for this project. I evaded this task precisely because I did not feel experienced enough to know how much of a commitment it was, and chose to work on things which were clearer on the roadmap.

I encourage anyone doing creative work to find a reasonable time limit for their tasks and adjust this to give yourself a helpful challenge! I hope that by doing so, you discover and improve on fun, efficient, and simple workflows.

Playing UAG

You can download the source code and latest releases of the UAG demo from my Github. It’s under an MIT licence, so you’re free to dissect and use the code and sprites for your own learning!
The old js-based web version of the game can be played on https://teunu.com/uag