Possible Contest Idea?

General Discussions
#1

I thought it would be a good, fun idea to have a contest similar to the java4k one but instead of a file size limitation, it’s variable limitation.

I was thinking that we could limit the number of variables to 32 variables of each data type and no user defined objects.
So like 32 bytes, 32 booleans, 32 shorts, 32 chars, 32 ints, 32 longs, 32 floats, 32 doubles, and 32 Strings.
The contest is to make a game with this limitation.

Anyone like the idea?

#2

4 kib of data?
well how about a game with limited color range? like only 16 colors?

#3

Yeah but that’s not enough of a limitation to create a challenge, imo. Plus i think someone already did an EGA thing which used a 16 color palette

#4

Keep in mind that you can store a lot of data in 32 Strings :point:

#5

:0 good point. Didn’t realize that when i wrote this. What else could we do

#6

Is the point to make it a technical challenge or a game design challenge?

For technical challenge:

  • All graphics/sprites should be contained in a single sprite sheet of limited size (color shifting allowed)
  • No hardware acceleration
  • Every asset must be procedural somehow

For game design challenge:

  • Very limited screen resolution (think giant pixels in old consoles)
  • Very specific control scheme: 1 button, NES gamepad, text parser, guitar controller, dance mat, wii remote…
  • Random combination of genres: Roguelike + dancing game, driving + platformer, metroidvania + cooking game, tile matching + endless runner + roguelike (wait… that’s 10000000 and You Must Build A Boat :stuck_out_tongue: )
    [/list]

Although some of those sound like the Ludum Dare or similar contests.

#7

A technical challenge. I’m curious to see how much information we can store in a limited amount of variables and still make a playable game. Of course the screen buffer doesn’t count towards the variable count.