Easy Game Competition

WIP games, tools & toy projects Archived Projects
#1

EDIT: shitty shitty poll system has screwed up and results are now all irrelevant (invalidated). I have made a new thread just for voting:

http://www.java-gaming.org/cgi-bin/JGNetForums/YaBB.cgi?board=Announcements;action=display;num=1097784528;start=0#0

Not now, not for at least one month (maybe more), but … once the next version of JGF is ready, I’d like to run a “mini” java game competition as a PR stunt ;D. Prizes at the moment are unexciting :frowning: unless I can find something better, but I can at least guarantee a free copy of Game Programming Gems 4 and another of GPG5 (I guess they could be signed if anyone cared ;)) as 2nd/3rd place prizes (each worth $70 RRP).

The main aim for the competition would be to make the largest number of people possible decide to enter, so the barrier for entry has to be low. For instance, a lot of us who entered the Sun competition felt under a lot of pressure competing against arbitrarily large studios who could have been working for up to 3 years on the game they submitted. I want a competition where anyone (including all those of us with little spare time, and including all the budding hobbyists) feels they can enter and not look stupid doing so.

I know a lot of people round here have entered the Ludum Dare competitions and 4kB competitions before (I’ve entered a few myself), so I’m looking for your thoughts on what works well and what doesn’t in those competitions. For instance, I think “you must release your source code” works particularly well, because everyone gets to feel that even if they lose they’ll still get to learn from their competitors :).

Um…the poll options are NOT very imaginative, but they were the only major options I could think of. Give me some more! ;D

#2

I’ll put up a free 1 year membership to GameLizard as a prize… tee hee hee ;D

#3

Er, in this day and age of 24-bit graphics and 32 bit code surely 64kb would be a more easily reached target? otherwise it just becomes an effort in writing obscurely designed crap code to fit your ideas into a couple of classes…

Cas :slight_smile:

#4

Pleeeeese make it a couple of Mb’s. At least 5…

The thing is that most game competitions (like the 4K) require more knowledge on optimistation rather than actual game creation, Game play…etc

Even 64K (i mean lwjgl itself is more than that ;))

That my opinion anyway.

#5

[quote]Er, in this day and age of 24-bit graphics and 32 bit code surely 64kb would be a more easily reached target? otherwise it just becomes an effort in writing obscurely designed crap code to fit your ideas into a couple of classes…

Cas :slight_smile:
[/quote]
Dunno. That’s why I’m asking ;).

I think the main aim is to prevent people from putting in gorgeous graphics that most others can’t compete with?

Anyway, I’ve written a real-time multiple-light source animated 3D engine with source + classfile fitting into 4Kb before, so good stuff is definitely possible. I guess, though, that making a game that isn’t dull as watching paint dry AND is graphically pleasing would require another 3kb-5kb?

Hmm. If we had a tiny kb competition, howabout:

  • 10Kb for the game
  • A list of allowed 3rd party libraries, including JOGL, LWJGL, etc.

I think tiny-kb games ought nowadays to allow OGL bindings etc? Especially if every game has to use webstart (which it will ;D), then if they all use the same links for the external libraries they will be guaranteed to be tiny downloads (after the first one :)) and yet have the richness of modern games.

Hmm. Sounds like a damn good advert for Java + Webstart to me…

#6

Modified poll options:

  • 4kb was clearly unpopular, so removed it entirely
  • added two new options

Feel free to REMOVE your vote and vote again if there’s something you prefer now…

#7

How about such small games only realized with Java2D? So it would be easier for many ppl who haven’t any experience with the OGL library,
4kb? a little bit to small if there are graphics and ya don’t know how to compress them :wink:

I prefer for a maximum size of 1MB, not more. That would also be fair to those who don’t know how to compress their data and it would made it possible to make the game looks better.

FOr the timeline i thing 4 weeks should be enough,

#8

I would think size isn’t as important as content. Ie just say that 500K is the max size, so that modem and broadband cant easily try it out vie JWS.

Then make 3 or so major catagories so you can get a spectrum of people.

Catagories -

  • Graphics Flare (Just gimmicky stuff to visually impress)
  • Complete game (Covers tic tac toe to full 3d everything)
  • Neato and Useful (Something between a game and a demo. Examples would be - a Sticky Note program, where the backgrounds are animated. An app which shows you how to fold an Origami bird. )

If they absolutely have to been only games then -

  • 3D (Using 3d engine to produce a 2d game doesn’t count here)
  • 2D Scroller (top down types, sideways spaceship types, etc)
  • 2D Non-Scroller (checkers, pac-man, etc)

Judge them on -

  • Creativity (3)
  • Judge’s Personal Slant (2)
  • Audio (present or not) (1)
  • Code comments (If people are going to learn, they will need these) (2)
  • Did it meet the size limit (1, -5 if it went over)
  • 1 Person team (2 for a one person team 0 for a two person)
  • Directions provided and accurate (1) You need to know how to play
  • ???

Adding the points up gives a max of 12 points. 5 of those depend on a person, so that might be enough to differentiate entries.

My thoughts any ways.

Dr A>

#9

Given how many such competitions fail to manage enough entrants to be worth running, I think we’ll just have one category UNLESS we get an unexpectedly large number of entries, then we can split it into categories.

Perhaps something like one category for every 10 entrants, and one overall category for choosing “winners” (the other cats just for honour and glory?)

Is it right to categorise by implementation? Would it be better to go by genre (“shoot em ups”, “board games”, etc)?

Working out the judging criteria is going to take considerable effort, to make sure it’s done properly (I’ve run stuff like this before, so I have a good idea what to do). Feel free to throw out any other ideas or suggestions, and I’ll put a document together nearer the time.

And, of course, there’s the issue of who judges them :). Good detailed judging criteria make this a lot less subjective, but perhaps just have two main categories: “judges” and “public”, where the former is a vote by a small number of people (10 perhaps) and the latter is a “free” vote where anyone with a JGF ID is allowed to vote for their favourite?

#10

I’ve written a real-time multiple-light source animated 3D
engine with source + classfile fitting into 4Kb before

Oh. You made that? ;D

Heh yea I remember it. Really jaw dropping :slight_smile:

Back on topic… well coming up with nice contest outlines isn’t that easy. And 4k is really hard. What’s imo bad about 4k is the focus shifting from making a game fast to squeezing out as much bytes as possible, which kinda sacrifices the benefits of Java. You end up with hard to read code, bad initialisation and usually rather bad performance.

I mean getting things pretty small is easy, but getting em really tiny is way too much work. Y’know there is a point were things start getting silly. You start wasting hours of time for peeling some bytes off here and there… and… well that kinda totally reverses the whole purpose of using java instead of something like assembler :wink:

Even 16k isn’t much better and 64k gets pretty restricted too if you want to use some sounds (yea you could use midi… but I’m talking about low qualitity wavs here [8bit/11khz/mono]).

So I guess it would be nice to have a pretty restrictive timelimit like 2 weeks and a not really restrictive size limit somewhere between 512 and 2048kb.

#11

The tiny apps like <64k should only be for the graphic demos. Interaction handling won’t fit in there.

@Source: Does the source counts to the overall size? Would be bad if so, source is allways bigger than the bytecode version.

#12

[quote]>I’ve written a real-time multiple-light source animated 3D

engine with source + classfile fitting into 4Kb before

Oh. You made that? ;D

Heh yea I remember it. Really jaw dropping :slight_smile:
[/quote]
Nah - I made the ugly one (I spent all my energy getting it working and then couldn’t think of what animation to do). The one Onyx is thining of had … water. As soon as I saw it I thought “Damn! Wish I’d thought of that!”.

But…my source code was 100x clearer ;). Well, it made me feel a little better at least :P.

OK. But…the big question here is: if we made it 2Mb, how many people are actually going to make sounds, grahpics, etc to take advantage of that?

And then compare that to: how many are NOT going to enter because they fear their game will look embarassingly crap compared to those who did use music and sounds?

I have some cunning plans for making a kick-ass competition that you’ll all love with sounds and graphics, but…it’s going to take a lot more organization AND it would require JGF had already run at least one competition to prove:

a) people will enter
b) we know how to run competitions

#13

Modified again (sorry if you tried to vote whilst I was modifying it - this poll system is truly god-forsaken awful).

Sorry to be annoying and keep changing the options :\ but I’m just trying to refine it so that we get conclusive results (previous options were producing an even split between 48 hours and 4 weeks, and weren’t helping on the other issues)

#14

2mb is to much. as for myself i don’t know where to take sounds, except of the games i bought :wink:

1mb is enough, even for sounds and graphics.

#15

Links please! You are talking about stuff us new people haven’t seen.

Dr A>