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[lowpoly]

Why not divide it in several steps so everyone can participate and show their talent?
For example, the judges determine the graphics are going to be: Rocks, Wood, Grass, Evil Alien and Jesus. The first stage is for the artists; the one who make the better Rocks+Wood+Grass+Evil Alien+Jesus wins.

This would be a great way to build packs for each competition. The art competition could be one step ahead of the design competition; whoever wins 'art', their art pack will be distributed to the community for the next design competition.

We'd have to cheat with the first one, someone would just supply a pack and we'd get started, but while the 1st design compo is running, the '2nd' art compo would run simultaneously.

[jaredbloom]

Well if enough people like the idea I suppose we could do it :D

[moi]

Why not divide it in several steps so everyone can participate and show their talent?
For example, the judges determine the graphics are going to be: Rocks, Wood, Grass, Evil Alien and Jesus. The first stage is for the artists; the one who make the better Rocks+Wood+Grass+Evil Alien+Jesus wins. The second stage is for game designers; the judges determine it is going to be an RPG. The best game design entry involving Rocks, Wood, Grass, Evil Alien and Jesus wins. The last stage is for programmers; the best RPG involving R+W+G+EA+TehGuy wins. New stages could be introduced for musicians, level designers, porn actors and whatnot.

Maybe a silly idea, but if well organized I think it'd be very very fun.

Good idea but I think the middle part would not be necessary. If everybody made a game with the same design and the same graphic pack, then the results would all be the same lol.
A two tier competition (1 graphics, 2 design and coding) would be a good idea.

Here is another idea, someone with the cpapbilities could code a sort of virtual console, that you could program only using a definite set of instructions. There would be a limit on the "cartridge memory" (size of program for each participant) . And there would also be some cool retro limitations on graphic (I don't know , could be like NES, or C64 or sega megadrive...)

Then we would be sure everyone would be on the same starting level and the results could be very cool (I know that the more limitations there are, the more interesting the creations are)

[wonderpus]

heck i'd even be interested in actually doing it on the C64 or Genesis

[Xion]

I've always wanted to try something with C64 restrictions...sounds fun.

[BMcC]

I like the idea of constraints.  The more retro the better.

[Markus Rosse]

Gameboy restrictions sounds quite funny for a contest. Did a small gameboy tetris clone in blitzbasic a few years ago for a gameboy contest.


(click on the image do download, sorry for the self advertisement )

The more retro the better? What about Atari 2600 specs? I don't know them exactly, but they look quite funny to do.

[BMcC]

Yeah, def!  Then people will have no excuse to not finish something.

And I find constraints and guidelines and such help focus creativity.  I'd love to see a GameBoy specs compo.

[Derek]

Good ideas, everyone!  My thoughts:

Game must be completed. Generally I don't think anyone enters these compos thinking they're not going to finish.  Nor do people start games thinking they're going to abandon them.  It just happens, whether by feature creep, perfectionism, or general laziness.  So instead of saying you have to finish, the idea should be to make the guidelines focus more on design and less on creating loads of art, code, or music.

Game judging in stages. This could be interesting, but it seems like there's a bit too much going on to make it work effectively.  For a one or two month compo, having multiple judging periods seems like it'd be a strain on the developers and judges both.  Let's start simpler.

Default graphics set. I think instead of forcing people to use the same graphics (which seems rather dull to me?), maybe we could create a generic graphics set for people to use if they're no good at graphics or for prototyping?  And you can add as much as you want to it.

Restrictions. I still think filesize is a good way to get people to finish their games and also force them to think more about gameplay versus graphics/music/etc.

Zombies is so overdone. I think the comic book one is cool though.

A few more:
Discovery, Freefall, Cyclic, Ancient Greece, Seek and Destroy, Exhale.

Yeah, no robots, zombies, pirates, or monkeys (as much as I like monkeys).  Vague themes make for more creative ideas.  I like your ideas.  I might even consider picking three of those randomly for a contest!

That would be kind of exciting... to get a list of a dozen themes, and then we'd use a random generator to pick 3 themes.

So yeah, that's how I'm leaning... for the moment.  A shmup contest would kinda be perfect, actually... for reasons that will be revealed soonish on the site.  Although the definition of "shmup" would be very VERY broad.

What do people think about 1 versus 2 months time to work?

[lowpoly]

I think the shorter the deadline, the better. That way, people like me may have a chance at actually finishing something without getting sidetracked.

[Inane]

Ancient Greece! Fuck yeah!
(I pretty much picked out 3 random posts from this thread to get an idea of what it's about)

Er... Yeah, thats my only comment.

_{Ancient Greece}

[Arne]

Zombie mall?

I think that could be interesting. I've always wanted to play a 2D zombie mall game. Could be turn based, realtime, "baldur's gate" style. Shooter, Puzzle, Exploration, Stategy.

Oh, no zombies.

Hmm how about a genre that really haven't gotten much attention in quite some time?

I really wanna do a LaserSquad/XCom game with Baldurs Gate "pause" style control.

Or a top-down WASD+Mouse game, like moonpod's Warangels or something Robotron. Not really suitable for the gameboy scale though?

Sim Ant? Autonomous units you can't control directly, instead you need to use the environment (like in DF). It could be a colony of anything really, as long as you can't micromanage.

Z/Dune 2/Herzog Zwei. The latter could work with the idea above. It was ages since I got a good dose of a nice topdown RTS. Mmm a macromanagement RTS. *Bulge in my pants* I'd rather play an RTS on a large screen though (otherwise it gets terribly cloustrophobic), but I suppose some Zoom/Overview features could be used.

So, my suggestion would be a game where you have to use the environment (or some sort of global control, or you're a chief unit of some sort) to control a mass of whatever, be it tanks, lemmings, dwarfs, sims, ants. Fits Derek's requirement for vagueness.

The Atari 2600 has pretty strange graphics restrictions. As far as I understood, you had to time the game code with the scanlines, ie, you did game physics stuff when the drawing beam was outside the screen, or sometimes between graphics on screen. Really tricky stuff. It also has something like the copper bar effect on the amiga, i.e. you could set colors for individual scanlines. The graphics could also be scaled for some pretty large pixels.


Adventure for the 2600 was a nice game. I think Atariage had a contest for making Adventure II some time ago though, otherwise that could be an idea.

[Madgarden]

I love zombies. And ninjas. So it would suck to put a restriction on them. I'd hope the rules would allow for artistic freedom on those details, and more define a general theme, such as Survival, Rotation, Attraction, Swarms, etc.

[moi]

If anybody wants to do an atari 2600 game, I remember someone released a basic that compiles to Atari 2600 binaries not long ago...
Oh and you don't know colors limitations if you didn't code with an Oric (t'was better to just stick to monochrome )

[Markus Rosse]

I think i remember that Arne did some Atari sprite test for a new "Adventure" Game? When you code your game for the computer, you don't have to mess around with restrictions, just imitate the old look, shouldn't be that hard. Maybe a simple black&white game like hero?

[wonderpus]

i like the idea of a set of graphics we are allowed to use .
these can simply be added too at will by those with pixel talent
like resources.tigsource.com ?

otherwise all i can give you is games with tetris style art and i don't mean the nice
background images

- Wonderpus

[Alec]

If the games all had the same art it would be kinda dull. But maybe we can set up some way to make it easier for programmers to find artists?

[konjak]

I hate competitions where everyone starts with the same art 

[lowpoly]

How about we code for the Altair? Or maybe punch cards?  :D

I'm all for some fun, creative restrictions but I think for the first compo we should keep it a little more open and loose.

[wonderpus]

I'm not suggesting that the resource pack be mandatory just a resource that it is approved for us to use .
just like a folder of submitted pixels and sounds and whatnot that COULD be used if you don't have pixel talent ?