Competition Genre Suggestions...

[chronozphere]

Sounds interesting. But are we talking about making games or making procedural art only?

I would rather like a GAME programming compo, i guess :?

[ianatwork]

I would rather like a GAME programming compo, i guess :?

Which of the original suggestions do you like ?

[ianatwork]

Personally I'm rubbish at 2D graphics and have no reason to believe that I'd be any better at 3D models and textures. From some of the comments on this thread I don't seem to be alone. I think that it would be best to concentrate on ideas that are programmatically challenging and don't have to be graphically amazing. Please understand that there is nothing to stop someone from having great graphics in their game if they have the skills or support from others. What I don't think is a good idea is to have a competition that puts the emphasis on graphics.

Some of the ideas are very interesting so maybe they could be used in mini-competitions later on in the year.

[chronozphere]

The "PGD Game festival" idea sound good to me :razz:

The sportsgames idea also sounds nice, but i can't think of a good game-idea that can keep me motivated for several months :?

Since we are all coders, i would suggest my own "minimal code, maximal functionality" compo-idea.
The advantage is, that any game can be made. The disadvantage is that its hard to properly judge functionality compared to code length, especially when different kind of games are involved.

ATM i'm allready busy with a nice gameproject. It should be finished within 2 months? Can anyone make a guess how much time i have before the compo starts? Will it start as soon as we have a good theme, or will it take another month?

[cairnswm]

Cut Scene engine - Thats right basically a story telling engine that is typically used to push the story along. Think Machinima, but could be 2D or 3D. Maybe picking your favourite movie scene and re-creating it with computer graphics and code. NO pre-rendered stuff, it must all be scripted and real-time.

No Thanks - to me thats not game development. It might be graphic based but its not game based. I personally am not a graphics programmer.

A game that can be controlled by someone with disabilities. EG, controlled by 1 key press, voice recognition, webcam interaction etc.

No thanks - been done before as Compo - (Was remakes.org theme about 2 years ago)

A maze based game.

A sport based game (arcade or manager/statistical style) as it is the Olympics this year.

An educational game.

Yes to all of them. I would really like to do some sort of sports game as a compo.

Something similar to this java based game http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robocode I'm quite interested in this as you compile your own tank and let it do battle against others.

I think this has been done to death. There have been C++ robot wars, pascal, java and who knows what else. It only seems to appeal to a small group of programmers. P-Robots was done in 1988 - http://pascal.sources.ru/gamestxt/probots.htm

A slight deviation from being robots only is to do a game that can be modified through scripts, ie something extendible. The script language can be left wide open - javascript, pascal script (DWS), Lua etc. But all the game objects behaviour must be modifieable through scripts. This might spawn a new commuity developed genre of games. Personally I think this might restrict the competition to the upper range of developers though. Our compos should be open enough for beginners to compete as well.

[jasonf]

If it's sports games, why not entitle this years Compo "The Big Race"

So basically, you have to design a game where you have to come first in something. There has to be competitors following the same rules as yourself.

This opens up all manner of types of games, Driving, Dragon Racing, Sports, Maze (as long as you're competing to get to the end before someone else does)

It can be multi-player or single player. It can cover multi-stage events (like Worlds Strongest Man or similar), It can be set in any style, age or setting.

It'll also attract people via interesting YouTube vids... (Where's WILL when you need him? :roll: )

[ianatwork]

If it's sports games, why not entitle this years Compo "The Big Race"

This sounds like a good idea. As you have summarised, I'm sure that people could produce some really original themes as well as the possibility of seeing some split screens or multi-player front ends.

[Ñuño Martínez]

What about a retro-style compo? Some technical and artistical limits as 2D, 16 colors, one or two sound channels only, less than 1Mb for disk space (uncompressed executable and data), coin-up style (demo loop, 1 & 2 players mode, hi-score, ...)... You know .

[paul_nicholls]

What about a retro-style compo? Some technical and artistical limits as 2D, 16 colors, one or two sound channels only, less than 1Mb for disk space (uncompressed executable and data), coin-up style (demo loop, 1 & 2 players mode, hi-score, ...)... You know .

Hey, that sounds like a great idea! :-)
Especially with my limited programmer art graphics ability, and basically no sound experience ;-)

cheers,
Paul

[3_of_8]

Yeah, and it's gotta run on an emulated DOS machine with 10 MHz. xD