One thing that puts me off the competitions is that the developer has to adhere to some extremely strict requirements.
Personally I would love to see a competition where people don’t have size limits.
Other restrictions can be put into place.
GameDev had a competition a year ago that you must use SpriteLib in your game.
Restrictions like this can keep the games easy to download and allow for more creativity.
What do you guys think?
Definitely! I recently proposed similar proposition. And this year GameDev had their 4 elements contest. That means the ONLY restriction is thematic one, not size, language or anything else. I am for that kind of competition, of course first limitation is to code in Java, second is theme (more or less abstract, no matter)…
For example, make a game and put it in midevial, futuristic … context.
Or, theme is love, beauty and other well - defined terms 
…
The purpose of that limit is to ensure that the required work stays low. This way the entry barrier is fairly low, but there is still some room to show off your skills. The drawback of the 4k limit is that its quite time consuming to write size optimized code.
For that reason I suggested once to run a compo with another limit. A single 256x256 texture (or 2^16 pixels altogether) and thats it. You cant do too much, but you also dont need to worry about the filesize… so you can use more than one class etc, which also means that you dont need to reinvent the wheel for everything all over again (eg you can use existing libs and tools).
What do you mean? That all graphics in game (made with help of textures) will be limited to one 256x256 texture? Hm… One could break it up in 8x8 = 64 textures with 32x32 in size, or 16 64x64 textures, which is still pretty much. I want to say, with 16 (or even 64) textures you can do much. So that is not very limiting (or enough limiting) factor as it seems. What do you think?
And why not to organize contest as KILER suggested it , no size limits, made in Java, 3rd libs whatever you want to use … Especially because there wasn’t one like that!
One could break it up[…]
Yea, of course. Well, often you need some kind of font… so there isnt much room left. Then you need something for the background, something for the foreground and something for the hud. (Generating textures would be forbidden.)
Either way it was just an idea for another kind of limit. A limit which caps the amount of work rather early without being too restrictive.
And of course there has been a competition without any limits in the past… the GDC 2004. And there werent that many participants, because beeing competive there involves a lot of work. I dont really see your point there actually… first you complain that 256x256 isnt restrictive enough and then you say we should start one without any restirctions.
Correction the spritelib contest was at least 3 years ago.
Like I said in the other thread; if you don’t like 4k or 16k or 96k fine, don’t participate. There are loads of other game coding contest every year that are open ended and have themes. Go find one of them and participate in those if that’s what you like. (In the other thread some one linked to the omg cup, there’s gamedev’s annual contest, speedhack, ludum dare, one button one week, Suns contest last year, etc…)
I like 4k, I like the restriction, I like the challenge. The java 4k had 51 entries last year, so I know I’m not alone. The open endedness you speak of is very stifling in my opinion.
If you guys want a different contest, then wait a few months and organize it on these forums, I’m sure there’ll be people who want to participate. 
My point was that limit on one texture size is not so big limit as it seems IMHO.
Yes, that is my WISH.
4k is great challenge of it’s sort, I admit. No limitness is great chalenge, too. You develop and develop and there is deadline, so you have to organize yourself very well to finish something playable and nice -looking…
I prefer time-limited competitions to size-limited, size limited tends to mean writting and rewriting ugly code. Time limited means keeping things simple but workable.
Ludum Dare’s 48 hour compotitions were pretty good, however 48 hours is a bit short if you want to get something playable and robust (only about half the entrants usually submit a final playable game). GameDev’s recent compo was a nice idea but way too long on the time scale - several months is overdoing it somewhat. If anything is universal though, its that no two people will want the same limits and rules for such an event. ;D
If you want some generic challenge, go for one of the generic game programming contests, there are plenty. Why start another for the sake of it?
Kev
How about a contest where the limit is the graphics and sound assets? That is a pool of images and sounds are made available to everyone and the rest has to be coded by hand. Simple vector-based graphics like the last 4k contest’s TAXI winner would still qualify.
The size of the code won’t matter (so long as you don’t cheat and stick JPG data in a static array or something ) and better, us art-impaired programmers won’t suffer as much 
Yes, that sounds like constructive and original idea. Of course, that pool should be ‘little of everything’ stuff . In that way it wouldn’t limit programmer too much (you can’t make funny cartoon like game with sounds of aarghs, oohs from horror movies :))
If you want to start your own competition, then there are already resources to help you. You can get a forum added here for it. Or at least get a general contest forum. Also woogley has a site that hosts game contests.http://javaunlimited.net
This is exactly what the JGF competition was going to be. I had the sound assets lined up from a professional sound group, and was waiting for the LWJGL to either happen or not happen (didnt want to have several on simultaneously 
). And then waited so long I ran out of time to do the competition.
[quote]And then waited so long I ran out of time to do the competition.
[/quote]
Hahahahaha…only a true brit can do that…
A competition needs some kind of guidelines, perhaps 4 weeks and 1 Meg (compressed zip) for all class/jar files and resources.
By allowing some time and limiting the size mainly for download reasons and not ‘see how much you can fit in so little’ should open things up to some higher quality, more complete games.
I agree. I was thinking that 4 weeks is enough, and not too long. About size limit, that is always discutabile, every programmer will have his opinion, I think. I would personally agree with ~1MB.
And some thematic guideline is necessary - it would be hard to judge without some rules, either type of game ( FPS ? ;), RPG, 2dshooter, 3d…) or theme (futuristic - historic , fun - horror …)
Again, it depends on the individual developers. I personally would not enter any 1mb contests, because I know I wouldn’t even stand a chance against the worst programmers, being sort of sucky at everything myself. That, and I rarely have time. 4k suits me perfectly, I can do very small games just for fun, and the graphics are nothing more than I can handle
have you heard about some cool game demo called kkrieger, if not go here:
http://www.theprodukkt.com/kkrieger.html
this is 97kb !!! demo 3d game and it looks like Doom3 or like Half-Life2, i am not drunked it is true, this game uses some special created mathematic functions that desribes textures, executable code, maps etc so everything is generated on fly in computer ram. Generally graphics is very good but also good hardware is really important like 1,5 ghz cpu, 512 ram, high end graphic card, maybe this is the future of gaming?
This game provides that even with limited amount of free space really cool things can be made, of course this game is made in c++ but those techniques can be also used in any java program, you must check it out, it is totally free and only 97 kb.
I’ve done a few tiny contests that were about doing some (trival) task in the least amount of sourcecode.
Usually reading bytes from System.in, processing it and writing to System.out.
It was like programming a 4k game, but much more intense, as every character mattered.
Reminds me of the old programming contests I used to do in highschool.
Now when I want to remember those days I head over to http://www.topcoder.com/ (Tell 'em Marvin sent you) and participate in a “single round match”
… I’ve won 4 T-Shirts (2 Topcoder open, 2 Google Code Jam) and in the old says when they paid cash to the top 3 in each ‘room’ I managed to get $100 out of them.