So, I'm thinking about running another contest soon. I was interested to hear what feedback people had about the contest. Any ideas on the format? Any ideas on ways it could be improved? Any ideas for thematic curve balls that would make things more interesting?

One of the things I was thinking of doing was creating a sprite board that everyone would be required to use. I've seen other contests like this and it seemed to work well. Maybe it would be a one-off thing, maybe I'd create different boards for each contest, maybe there would be a single, standard board for all future contests. I'm kind of leaning towards the latter.

I like the idea of a standard asset list. First impressions (which go a long way) will always lean toward a "pretty" game, which is a shame in these short contests where graphics should have little or no weight.

I think the best way for these really short contest to get people focused on making creative use of the theme is to provide them with a framework and let everyone use that framework. The framework should be multi-platform and should allow people to express the "theme" in whatever creative fashion they wish without having to roll their own tech.

-ddn

Quote: Original post by ChurchSkiz
I like the idea of a standard asset list. First impressions (which go a long way) will always lean toward a "pretty" game, which is a shame in these short contests where graphics should have little or no weight.

I agree with this, but I think it might work better to make everyone use generic polygons. That way you aren't restricted to a side view or top down game. Or say you can use the sprite sheets provided or any geometric primitives.

Quote: Original post by ChurchSkiz
I like the idea of a standard asset list. First impressions (which go a long way) will always lean toward a "pretty" game, which is a shame in these short contests where graphics should have little or no weight.

Yeah, the ASCII art restriction in the past was designed to prevent that, and I think it largely succeeded.
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Quote: Original post by ddn3
I think the best way for these really short contest to get people focused on making creative use of the theme is to provide them with a framework and let everyone use that framework. The framework should be multi-platform and should allow people to express the "theme" in whatever creative fashion they wish without having to roll their own tech.

-ddn

The problem with a framework is that everyone usually uses a completely different language from everyone else. It would be no good to provide a C# framework if people were also competing in Python and &#106avascript.

On the other hand, if the community as a whole wants to pitch in to create a repository of "2D game stubs" in various languages, either adhering to a certain overall design or being implemented in a style most natural to the host language, that would be totally rawksome.

A bit of history: art of the "secret theme" aspect of the contest is to prevent people from submitting previously completed games. But that does not mean you can't use a game framework that you have found or developed for yourself. I've thought long and hard about this and I don't think I even want to prevent someone from using such a framework. I'm much more interested in the gameplay ideas rather than the code that people create in 3 hours. So spend the lead-in time to the contest making your render-loop code, that's fine.

Quote: Original post by way2lazy2care

Quote: Original post by ChurchSkiz
I like the idea of a standard asset list. First impressions (which go a long way) will always lean toward a "pretty" game, which is a shame in these short contests where graphics should have little or no weight.

I agree with this, but I think it might work better to make everyone use generic polygons. That way you aren't restricted to a side view or top down game. Or say you can use the sprite sheets provided or any geometric primitives.

Unfortunately, polygon rendering is pretty inaccessible to a lot of people. Not going to block it, but not going to require it either.

ASCII art was really successful. But it is very limiting (which is both its blessing and curse). I would like to duplicate that success in a more compelling way.

I also think our judges have historically been very understanding of the limitations of the contest and have not docked points for "programmer art". There is no overall judging criteria, I let the judges decide their own personal ranking and then I use an IRV to determine the final results. But so far, it seems that the best game play has always won, regardless of graphics.

Quote: Original post by way2lazy2care
I agree with this, but I think it might work better to make everyone use generic polygons.

So as long as you don't texture your polygons, anything goes? [wink]

I think having a graphic resource limitation is a good idea because it helps set a strict limit. Competitors won't have to spend any of their limited three hours making their own art or wondering where to grab it from. Alternatively you could go back to making it ASCII only, although working with ASCII console displays can be quite arcane (although it's not so bad if you're allowed to fake it in a traditional 2D graphics library by displaying a sprite grid of ASCII)

I like the themes you use in the contest - one word, simple, can be interpreted however you like. That's all you need for a 3H contest.

Quote: Original post by Trapper Zoid
So as long as you don't texture your polygons, anything goes? [wink]

touche

I guess you could make it geometric primitives where each object can only have 3 geometric primitives included in it or something of that nature.

Awesome :)

Restricting assets is an interesting approach. You have to be careful that everybody is basically able to use them. Give 'er a go ;)

Okay, moving forward with the common resource pack (you know what? let's add audio files to this pack), so far we've seen projects submitted in the following systems:
C/C++ with SDL
C/C++ with raw OpenGL
C/C++ with raw D3D
Python + PyGame
.NET with GDI+
Java with Java2D
Flash
Dynamic HTML (i.e. pre-HTML5 chicanery)

I'm going to have to go back through to see what else there is, but I think that covers the majority of cases. I'll consider these the target platforms to ensure that the final resource pack is usable on all of them.

What other platforms do you think I should include? What do I need to consider for audio (as I've never done much more than play raw PCM WAV files)? I'll probably distribute images as PNG files; if you need them in another format they won't have lost any data for you to convert them to your format of choice.

How could you forget XNA??