Having won NaNoWriMo the past three years (and another time several years before those), I think it’s safe to say that I’m capable of writing the first draft of a 50,000-word novel in the span of 30 days. The next time I write a work of fiction of that length, I’d like to release it after having a chance to give it some polish, instead of immediately posting the first thing to fall onto my keyboard.
So this November, I’m going to try to kick things up a notch.
I am going to try to create, from scratch, a fully-functional web-based multiplayer game during the month of November. By the end of November 30, I hope to have something that works and that I wouldn’t mind running on a closed network populated by trusted users. After all, just as a NaNoWriMo novel isn’t going to be in publishable quality at the end of November, I’m not expecting my program to be of high enough quality to be able to be run securely on the real Internet.
And, of course, by “from scratch”, I mean not having written any code for it yet. I’m still going to be using libraries and whatnot. It’s not like I’m going to be writing raw assembly directly to an executable or anything. That’d be crazy. And annoying. But then, it’s not as though you’re first inventing your own language when you do NaNoWriMo anyway.
Since this is something I’ll be doing on my own, it’s much more local than it is national. And I’ll be writing code instead of a novel. So it’s really a LoCoWriMo, which sounds about right.
Obviously, I won’t be posting playable demos every day, but I will be coming up with some sort of status update to post here each day. I haven’t quite figured out what will be interesting or make sense in terms of metrics. Shooting for a 50,000-line program is even more absurd than shooting for a 50,000-word novel. I’ll come up with something, I’m sure.
I wonder how long it’ll take before I start regretting this….
