Remakes have the advantage that the gameplay is known to work, and (as said earlier) the player already has a fair idea how to play. I suspect the nostalgia factor also helps. However games with an original twist are the ones that get me excited. Thus a variation on a trusted theme probably is the best.
Last year’s rules worked well. Thanks Appel for organising this again.
I’ve nothing against clones, remakes, or demakes (although it would be nice if developers acknowledged their influences in the game descriptions) but I don’t think it’s fair for games to use assets (sprites in particular) that are stolen from other games.
It’s not the legal issues (if the lawyers aren’t bothered then I’m not), it’s that I do think a game gains an unfair advantage from trading off the popularity of existing IP. Would the game still be as good if it used different artwork? Yes? Then there’s no reason to use stolen sprites.
Simon
Ooh ooh, the 4k! Exciting!
No entry for me last year… first time I didn’t enter since 2005. It’s on!
(On the remake discussion: I’ve made a mix of “remakes” and original games, and I think both should be allowed. The remakes I’ve made have all been often-remade game styles (bridge builder, scorched earth) rather than specific games, though.)
what about having categories like: remakes, action, adventure, maze, racing, rpg, fps, etc? And we can choose one winner per category. Not sure how many games we will have this year but I think adding categories would be great.
There’s been categories (though of a different sort) earlier years. I think they were along the lines of “Overall, Technical, Graphics” or something like that. It was removed for whatever reason. Adding new categories might just be confusing, though I’m not sure.
categories fragment the entries.
If overdone, the contest would starve from too few games per category.
Every contest needs boundaries, but the 4k itself is the interesting boundary here.
Other contests, impose retrictions on themes, dev-time or style. But there pure asset-amount force can push up the grading.
The nice thing about 4k is that there is only so much space in the sandbox to build custom castles.
This really pushes creativity.
The categories were removed simply because it’s difficult for judges to give an appropriate score for each. Difficult enough to decide on one score and write review for 50-60 games, but with multiple scoring for one game it becomes a daunting task to do. Better just to have one overall score where everything is factored in. Having special categories for like graphical look could make people focus more on graphical look than gameplay, so the categories could distort the design of the games.
First off, the Java4K site is awesome! 8)
One small thing that could be improved is the user comments. Publishers should me made to register to submit their game, however, players should not have to just to leave a comment. If you used a service like http://www.disqus.com/ then I think we would see a lot more comments on the games.
Yea, need to improve that.
Need to look at social integration, how and if to do it.
The java4k.com | Getting Started | JavaGaming.org forums link points to last years contest.
There is a display error in the description texts on java4k.com: single and double quotation marks are preceded by backlash (i.e. ’ and ").
The Wikipedia article on Java 4K does not mention year 9.
Thanks. Will update.
Hi zeroone, will you be entering this year?
I like to see more of your projects.
I added one new rule, really just for me to be on the safe side of things.
[quote]10. Games that break copyright, e.g. clones, will be removed and disqualified if the copyright holder demands it.
[/quote]
http://java4k.com/index.php?action=view&page=rulesjudg
Maybe it’s too harshly worded. It’s only happened a couple of times, and still the games didn’t break any rules…so I kinda felt bad about it. But with this rule it’s “at your own risk” making an similar clone of the original. Ok 
Sounds fair to me.
[quote]9. Must not be identical to a game submitted previously.
[/quote]
it’s quite hard to search for submitted identical entry since titles don’t describe all. I’m working on remake so any tips?
it’s quite hard to search for submitted identical entry since titles don’t describe all. I’m working on remake so any tips?
[/quote]
I think the idea is you don’t just submit something you entered in a previous year. If you’re starting from scratch you’re probably fine.
So it means to not “identical to my previous submit, not to other’s submits” right? because on remake there’s chance ppl already made one before you.
Identical in this case means same code, same visuals, same mechanics (at least I think it does). There’s been several tetris clones, that’s not usually a problem - they tend to be different implementations.
Well… just color your cubes differently just to be safe ;D
Then I guess I’m on safe position since mine is more complex a bit, time to done it! ;D