The 2013 coding challenge - make 12 games in 12 months and FINISH them!
No prizes, but you gain a lot of experience getting games finished and keeping things simple. I’ll be first to admit to having finished ZERO games in 20 years, so I think it’ll be a great challenge.
The blog post http://www.mcfunkypants.com/2012/12-games-in-12-months/ is interesting also, this guy’s account of having already made 12 games in 12 months and what the benefits were.
Who’s in? 
if school didn’t exist then sure! haha
I may take a gap year before heading off to college, so this would be a fun way to spend a year. It does seem a bit tedious, though, with the challenge lasting an entire year.
Well it sounds like you can skip months, or drop out, at your leisure. You could do it for 3 months. At least 1 month would be helpful.
You can also enter just about anything you make. New games, games you added levels to, games you used for other game jams… Whatever. The idea is to encourage you to work on it, not to stick to any rules.
Even though I have a game I’m going to try to seriously work on, I’m still going to try to find time for at least 1 little game a month to submit.
Sounds like a plan. I only have limited hours to work on stuff so it might be a squeeze for me, but we’ll see 
I tried making a game before in a month and way overshot on the scope/time needed, so it’s time to think VERY small, lol
Thinking about dropping college, I study graphic design there and im not learning or doing anything, its just a matter of some girl asking for help, then the teacher pointing them towards me. Would love to do this, Shame I can’t find the golden programming partner. Guess I should start myself again, just dont have the time/motivation.
Note: Our college is not University. It is highschool for you 'muricans
If you’re not a programmer, have you tried any of the visual programming tools which are easier for artists?
some people have many free time
Well, I dont know about there but surely you need to at least finish college to be elligible for University? (It sounds like college is like highschool but you pick your subjects?)
I just quit all my hard subjects in school so now I have the easiest year… most people say its a bad idea but but I don’t care, I’m doing all the subjects to get into my university course so hopefully it will work out splendidly.
But after school you (ideally) get a job, and then you have even less spare time to make games! Use it while you’ve got it!
Well its easy to prototype a game but can you really finish a game in a month. Whats the point of taking it to a half way complete state vs just stopping when you are bored of it.
Rapidly prototyping out a game concept is a very handy skill to have. This is a great way to get practice at that skill, not to mention all the other skills you’re using at the same time.
What I think someone could gain from the challenge is skills in getting stuff finished, ie not letting ideas constantly creep in to expand the scope, learning to make hard decisions about cutting out stuff even if it seemed like a good idea, writing code that is very specific to the job and not some kind of fancy generic system that opens the door to reusability ie gets the job done sooner, learning how to write better code in general, etc… … also if the little games you make are of reasonable quality/playability there might be some potential to monetize them in some way. … that’s kind of my concern though, that I may not be able to make a sellable game within just 1 month, and expect to make any money from it.
Well you could probably sell the games as starter kits then
In response to you Tyler, Education is meaningless for this field of work, I dont plan on going to Uni, and If I do, Ill work my way in via portfolio rather than qualifications.
Sounds impossible.
But looks like once you do it, it becomes easier.
I couldn’t even settle on an idea within a month. May be if you can go procedural. Smarter classes. Reusing your platformer code and change the graphics, enemy type for each game.
…nah…still sounds impossible!
It’s quite doable, you just need to aggressively keep scopes down. Add nothing unless the game needs it, write code that gets the job done rather than code that’s awesome (though you’d be surprised that with a bit of practise you can do both at once), and so on.
On one hand I’d love to join in, on the other I know the impact it’d have on the projects I’m already doing.
Though my main project’s inception was as a game I decided to write in one week, and I did in fact get the initial version (with primitive art) done in that time.
Wow, why even bother then? Don’t you get discouraged? I would!
I absolutely don’t expect to make money from any of the games I submit to this. I could see some of them prototyping out features for a better game, but none of them will be saleable after polish. They’ll need a lot more work than that.
Think of it as a monthly Amnesia Fortnight. DoubleFine got a lot of good ideas prototyped out that way, though I admit they had larger teams than most of us will have.
Still and all, I’ve got a lot of little things that I need to learn how to do, and this will be a good opportunity to concentrate on them.