Looks like we’re going for another roll ;D
I have a feeling last years format was pretty good, applets only, community voting + judging panel, so I think we’ll stick with that.
Any comments? What should be improved, especially with regards of the site?
Anything new to shake things up or make things more interesting?
Looks like Java 7 isn’t official yet, so I guess we’ll stick with Java 6 (latest) as target JRE.
+1 applets only. I would like to see more encouragement given for originality. Last year the standard was exceptionally high as ever but what kinda spoilt it was the number of remakes.
I don’t think remakes have ever won the contest. While remakes are cool, they’re not winning material, only original good games are. I mean, there’s only so much you can enjoy playing tetris or pacman for the billionth time.
I think 2011 hit a good balance. Some people may want some tweaks to the voting system (more points per user?), but the big items worked really well: applets only, community + judge voting, and allowing for posting the source and when.
[quote]I don’t think remakes have ever won the contest. While remakes are cool, they’re not winning material, only original good games are. I mean, there’s only so much you can enjoy playing tetris or pacman for the billionth time.
[/quote]
Nearly every game in last years top 5 looks like a remake to me.
Quite a few other ppl on other sites commented on this too. Check out some of the links on this thread and the comments in them:
Nearly every game in last years top 5 looks like a remake to me.
Quite a few other ppl on other sites commented on this too. Check out some of the links on this thread and the comments in them:
I think remakes are pretty cool, the nostalgia can be as rewarding if not more so than innovation.
Besides most of the current and next generation of game players probably haven’t played or even seen some of the classic C64, Atari, Nes, Snes, etc games that are usually remade for 4k, so it’ll probably be innovating and new to them :).
Even though no remake has won a Java4k contest yet, they have come pretty close (2nd place) and make up the majority of the top 10 each year.
Sure innovation should be rewarded but so should a good and well done remake (especially if it adds a twist like demakes do).
Remakes have really good advantage. Player know allready how it should be played. There is not much of room to tutorials, in game hints etc. Many ppl don’t understand that if you make totally new and original idea but you can’t tell to player how it work players don’t learn before they are bored.
Presentation:
Maybe it should be allowed to have 1 or 2 screens with a Quicktutorial displayed under the applet.
Since a lot of players browse though these games, they might not want to read any text, and just skip the instructions.
Some visual Help-Screen (Picture beats Text) can avoid getting the player annoyed after not figuring out how to play the game,
and just skip it after 10 seconds.
The Overview picture can also show the types of levels that are in the game / screenshots.
Its hard to catch initial interest in the game from just a small 128x128 thumbnail.
Format:
How about other kinds of archive formats are allowed, with the server unpacking and streaming the jar from the original archive.
Like 7z etc.
The user can download the archive, and unpack it locally as proove.
Would be an idea for the future, to give the 4 kilobyte idea even more space to fill with gameplay.
[quote=“steveyO,post:5,topic:37494”]
I think bysse’s reply to that was spot on:
[quote=“bysse,post:25,topic:36484”]
Leaving aside that fact that there are only a handful of original games made in any format in a given year. But anyway…
And, at least some years, there seemed to be a definite scoring bias in favour of Nintendo remakes, so the ambitious may want to take that into account. I personally am thinking of remaking a game I played on an OS 8 Mac in the late 90s and haven’t seen remade since.
Everything is a remake: Nothing is new under the sun.
I think the point I was trying to make was… originality is indeed rewarded, there may be no special category for it, but I believe judges and people participating in community voting do factor it in.
There is a rule: “Must not be identical to a game submitted into previous 4k competitions.” I do wonder what effect this has on remake games, when someone submits an identical remake of the original. Maybe this should be changed into “Must be an original game, or an original (not an identical) remake/demake.” It has happened once or twice that I’ve been contacted about removing a game from the contest because it was copyright infringement… bla bla, I don’t have lawyers so I complied.
I like this idea. We may need to throw it around a bit to see about image sizes and such, but it might help. Although, one thing I learned from a previous game entry was to consider making games that lend themselves to easy pick-up-and-play, without lots of instructions.
I don’t agree here. Adding extra layers like this prevents the games from being hosted on other servers. We already allow Pack200, which adds a whole bunch of space beyond the normal jar.
Okey dokey. I can see I am in the minority here, fair enough! I may go for a remake myself at risk of being accused of hypocrisy 
Actually any game can be referenced to some previous games or gamestyles. There are no blank slates, just like in music.
Its more a question of how close of a predecessor it has.
Sometimes its actually a unique game but referencing another game, thus making it look like a remake.
One exiting part of the contest is also the “Wow how can they make XXX that I know in 4Kb”
Its often a simple tradeoff between gamemechanics and Graphic Rendering/Effects.
Too much bytes spend on gameplaymechanics can leave the presentation look boring and revoke players to play try the game and actually experiencing the gameplay.
Too much bytes spend on rendering can make it look like a beautiful GFXdemo with dull or stiff gameplay.
Last contest Boing 4K was my favorite, mixing a cool gameplay (wich I played over 1 hour) with a nice presentation.
(It gets much cooler after the first introductory levels)
Which was a real problem for the judges… we had many games to judge, so you can’t expect us to put more than 5-10 minutes into each game. Hence my relatively low score for the game, I simply didn’t see the game getting better as I stopped too early.
I think the current format is ideal, anything goes so long as it fits in a 4k jar . Part of the appeal of this contest is there are no restrictions on the type of game. Many other contests (ludum dare) place restrictions via a theme. This has been discussed here before; there simply isn’t enough room in 4k to add extra requirements regarding content. The traditional anything goes in 4k seems best to me, and seems to have been great for the contest thus far.
I admit, some games may be underrated, but that’s the nature of judging in any setting.
I recognized that Boing 4k was a good game, and gave it 92% (one of the highest score I gave). I think I played it for 30 minutes or so, not because I wanted to find out if it was any good, it just got me hooked, and that’s what good games do, they get you hooked after few minutes. Left4kdead did that, Miners4k, Burning Man, and all the winners in the past.
5-10 minutes should be enough to get playing. Ask yourself, how much time do you yourself give some random flash game a chance you’ve never played? If you can’t get going in 1-2 minutes, you just do something else.
Games should allow new players to comfortably start, with ease, train them up by making the missions more difficult, and it should all feel very natural. Burning Man is a great example of this, easy pie at start, but something new introduced each level which you have to figure out… but not too complex.
If you wish to make a potential winner game, study this aspect of the top games in the 4k contest, design your game so it’s easy to start, and increasingly gets more challenging. Not saying that’s the silver bullet, but at least one of them in a revolver 
last years rules, juding the most important, were definitely the best yet in that last year had the least bickering. I recently went though the posts of the previous years competitions looking for 4k programming gems and i could not believe how negative people were to first Woogley and then Appel in regards to rules especially judging. My memory of previous competitions must have skipped over the negativity.
It is challenge to write good remake, especially under 4 kb.
Let’s imagine someone who wants to write chess game.
Chess have rigid rules, so there is not much room for creativity, but it is possible to write better engines, improve performance, graphics, reduce bugs, etc.
About the competition.
I like it very much and I have been waiting for another edition. Unfortunately for most part of the year there is nothing happening.
Maybe would be better to allow submit games all the year. From time to time start up a topic for programmers, or something like that, to keep motivation.
By the end of the year there would be judging of all games submitted during passing by year.