no worries HC, the deadline was pushed to the28th due to some confusion. In fact your entry is greatly welcomed because it makes the grand total exactly 50 games! Unless, of course, somebody pops up before midnight.
I’m gonna go ahead and assume everyone has posted their entry… so I’m going to start on the lsit update now
Hey, great! Thanks. 
Before I speak, I’d like to thank a few people for making the contest possible:
Mlk: For hosting previous contests and expending a great deal of time and energy in bootstraping the contest.
Woogley: For his hard work in collecting and organizing the entries.
ChrisM, Blah3h, SWPalmer: For agreeing to be our judges.
Will everyone stand up and give them a round of applause? We couldn’t have done this without you guys! ;D 
8)
(Did I forget anyone? :-[)
Now, on to business. I’d like to go over the rules I presented and explain why I balanced them as I did. I’m hoping that will help everyone come to an agreement on what the rules should be:
[quote]1. Graphics (points: 0-10)
2. Gameplay (points: 0-10)
[/quote]
The two most important features of any game are how great it looks on the screen (which directly affects how immersive it is) and how much fun it is to play. These two are core to what gaming is, and thus were given very large scales.
[quote]3. Sound (points: 0-5)
[/quote]
While sound is integral to most games today, it is unfortunately very difficult to add any worthwhile sounds to a game that fits in 4K. Even simply generating a bleep or bloop eats up a great deal of space from all the necessary class references. As a result, I feel that acheiving sound is an accomplishment that should be recognized and awarded.
However, the recognition should be proportional to the impressiveness of the accomplishment. It would be somewhat unfair to award a high point value for a game that produces a very poor excuse for game sounds. Thus the scale was set to 0-5. Keep in mind that what qualifies as a 5 for sound will probably take a lot away from the gameplay and graphics, so it is fair to give a very heavy weighting to this.
It is, of course, up to the judges to decide what is impressive and what isn’t.
[quote]4. Self Executing [i.e. java -jar] (points: 0 or 1)
[/quote]
I am honestly horrified by the number of entries that were not self-executable. Part of any good game is professional style and delivery. Yet we are dealing with very tight space restrictions, so requiring a bit more work from the user is forgivable. Still, the professionalism in making a game accessable is something that should be recognized, even if it has a low impact on the overall score.
Note that this score is intended to include both executable JAR files and webstart programs. The difference between these two is fairly minor for a contest like this, and favoring one over the other is (IMHO) a mistake. Allow the programmer to choose which method works for him.
[quote]5. Music (points: 0 or 5)
[/quote]
Like pixmaps, music tends to eat up a lot of data file space in addition to the space eaten up by class references. Any game that includes music is bound to lose out in the areas of graphics and gameplay. (As I think a particular entry demonstrates.) Yet because of the difficulty of accomplishing this feat, it should be strongly recognized, and the score should help even out the loses accepted in graphics and gameplay. It is, again, up to each judge to decide what qualifies as “music” and what is merely noise or sound effects.
In short, I balanced the scoring to reflect the give and take inherent in writing a game for a contest such as this. No one category is sufficient to offset what others might do in another category. Thus each programmer may strive for his strengths and allow the chips to fall as they may (hopefully in his favor ;-)).
One last point I’d like to make. I believe that the judges should have the discretion of adding small bonuses and demerits to each games. For example, some people are impressed by 3D coding. If a judge feels it worthwhile, he could tag on a +1 3D. Or (if he’s like me) he might find professional documentation to be of high importance to the overall experience and thus give a +1 bonus for that.
On the other hand, a judge may find that a given game often locks up due to bugs and give a -1 for that. Or perhaps he finds that a game runs well only on particular versions of an OS and gives a -1 for that.
My only caution on this is to encourage the judges to be reasonable and not get too wild with bonuses and demerits. Try to keep the perspective of a professional game in mind. e.g. This game might not run on Linux, or this one might not run on the Mac. Yet this is common in the gaming industry and probably shouldn’t be punished. OTOH, full cross platform support is rare in the industry and is often lauded as a Good Feature ™. Thus giving a bonus for a fully cross platform game would not be out of character.
That’s pretty much it. Good luck to all the entrants!
I’d like to let everyone know that it was a joy to help the 4K contest along, and I appreciate the anonymous $200 donation… whoever donated.
The rules jbanes proposed seem fair. I would like to remind the judges, that at least for this year’s contest… a signed webstart JAR that exceeds the 4K limit is forgivable ONLY if their is an unsigned alternative to the game. Next year we will have to edit the rules on this as it seems to be somewhat of a roadblock.
From now on I plan on hosting the contests the right way- not a silly table of games done at the last minute. See my sig for a slight peek at what I’m cooking up in my kitchen.
The final game list update will be posted at midnight tonight. The judges will start judging tomorrow, and it’s fair to give them a week, so I ask that I receive the results from the judges themselves via PM by March 8th. It seems the judges have a long, 50-game road to travel this week! Take your week’s time, judges! I dont advise you judge all 50 at the same time 
Good luck to all entrants!
edit:
Okay, seriously this time, the deadline has expired! The J4K 2004-2005 contest ended up with 50 games, as I said earlier. The Games List has been updated accordingly. Enjoy!
[quote]I am honestly horrified by the number of entries that were not self-executable. Part of any good game is professional style and delivery. Yet we are dealing with very tight space restrictions, so requiring a bit more work from the user is forgivable. Still, the professionalism in making a game accessable is something that should be recognized, even if it has a low impact on the overall score.
[/quote]
I’m not sure I think ease of starting the game should affect the scoring at all, since that’s one of the few things the original rules were clear about:
[quote]The presentation (jar, class, or other) does not matter, as long as the code can be directly run from the shell.
[/quote]
I’m with JBanes.
I did not play several of the games because I didn’t feel like extracting the zips and locating command.com (or run: cmd and cd-ing over to the correct directory). It’s too much work for a game I’ll play at the most a few times.
Click and run (executable jar) or webstart please.
Except the RULES said it didn’t matter.
[quote]Except the RULES said it didn’t matter.
[/quote]
I think you are refering to rules to be accepted as a contribution. You dont have to have sound in the game to get it accepted, but you will score higher with it, just as executable jar should give you higher score. I personally think that is fair, and it is only one point I guess.
Hope I didn’t step on any toes.
If the rules said “Sound does not matter”, I would argue that sound should give 0 points, yes.
I can live with the judges handing out one point for a game being easy to start, though. I’m just pointing out that it’s not what the original rules said.
(and, in extension, that we need to agree on the rules on how a game gets judged BEFORE we start the next competition)
[quote]One last point I’d like to make. I believe that the judges should have the discretion of adding small bonuses and demerits to each games. For example, some people are impressed by 3D coding. If a judge feels it worthwhile, he could tag on a +1 3D. Or (if he’s like me) he might find professional documentation to be of high importance to the overall experience and thus give a +1 bonus for that.
On the other hand, a judge may find that a given game often locks up due to bugs and give a -1 for that. Or perhaps he finds that a game runs well only on particular versions of an OS and gives a -1 for that.
My only caution on this is to encourage the judges to be reasonable and not get too wild with bonuses and demerits. Try to keep the perspective of a professional game in mind. e.g. This game might not run on Linux, or this one might not run on the Mac. Yet this is common in the gaming industry and probably shouldn’t be punished. OTOH, full cross platform support is rare in the industry and is often lauded as a Good Feature ™. Thus giving a bonus for a fully cross platform game would not be out of character.
That’s pretty much it. Good luck to all the entrants!
[/quote]
I think the judges should be limited to a single bonus or demeret per game. This way they cannot go wild with bonus/demeret points, but can still give recognition.
ps. I like your point system and reasoning.
[quote]I’m just pointing out that it’s not what the original rules said.
[/quote]
That’s true. We’re just going to have to let it slide. If I did a rule change… I would have to e-mail each participant and give them another week or so to make corrections with their game. This is one of those glitches that are only fixed after you’ve SEEN the problem. We’ll just set some tighter rules next year. Until then, use good ol’ command prompt!
That depends on ones interpretation of the sentence.
I take “does not matter” to mean that it won’t exclude your game from entering. Using the sound analogy, it does not matter if your game does not have sound, you can still enter. Games with sound however score points for having it since it adds to the game and may reduce their capacity to earn points in other areas (due to the cost). Otherwise, nobody would use sound. Likewise with executable .jar’s. What’s the point of throwing away 300 valuable bytes for nothing?
As self-executing .jars are much easier to run than via the shell, and since the manifest is quite costly, they should deserve some bonus points. Since people are using JNLP files and not counting the bytes for those, why should people using manifest.mf files have to count the bytes not get anything back?
Additionally, the judging guideline proposed in January included a bonus for self-executing .jars. Markus_Persson, you recently objected to the judging rule changes which did not suite you. Well, I think those of us with self-executing .jars would object to this judging rule change, as it does not suite us. The sword cuts both ways my friend.
Will.
As I said, I’m fine if people with easy-to-launch games get a bonus point. (Heck, Dungeon4k has a nice jnlp link, so it’d get a bonus point for free)
I just want us to agree on the rules BEFORE the contest ends the next time around.
Anyway how about link to previous 4K contest in the http://woogley.net/games.html page
So we can track all games from previous contest too, all 4K games that ever made.
PS: I wonder where’s Abuse entry?
Is he not participate in this contest?
[quote]As I said, I’m fine if people with easy-to-launch games get a bonus point. (Heck, Dungeon4k has a nice jnlp link, so it’d get a bonus point for free)
I just want us to agree on the rules BEFORE the contest ends the next time around.
[/quote]
I agree that the rules should be sorted out before hand. To late for that now though.
Regarding the JNLP link, do you count the JNLP file in your 4096 bytes? If not, why should you get a bonus?
Look at it this way, you have an extra 300 bytes by not including a manifest.mf file. So your reward is the 300 bytes which you can use to better your graphics or gameplay, my reward is bonus points for making an easy to execute, fully self-contained program.
Will.
I see your point.
[quote]I see your point.
[/quote]
Thanks
[quote]Anyway how about link to previous 4K contest in the http://woogley.net/games.html page
So we can track all games from previous contest too, all 4K games that ever made.
[/quote]
See this thread. I’m making an entire site for the 4K, and if possibly this year’s 16K if I can get it done fast enough.
Nope, never saw an entry from him. Guess he’s holding out for 16K?
Hi,
as promised, I have released a source code to 4k-tris:
http://sweb.cz/petrblahos/4ktris/4ktris-1.0-src.zip
Enjoy, Petr
BTW, judges, please note that my official submission is not the
one linked from jnlp on the “Games” page (http://www.woogley.net/games.html), but
http://www.woogley.net/j4k/4ktris/4ktris-1.0.jar, which does fit in 4K.
I’ve also released the source of G4k, after adding a probably-too-lengthy blurb about some of my thought process while I was designing and programming it.
It’s located with the other G4k files: http://w4jdh.net/~seigfried/g4k/