Function 2007 game development competition
Our newest competition this year is in game development - the idea is fairly simple: create an entertaining, simple (or complicated) computer game, that can be enjoyed by the audience throughout the party.
The rules are the following:
- The game cannot be bigger than 16 megabytes compressed.
- The game is not allowed to write on the hard disk, only in it's own directory!
- Although it's not compulsory, we recommend that the game should have a multiplayer mode, since it's usually a lot more fun and involves more people in the game itself. (Whether the mode is network multiplayer or local doesn't matter.)
- The game should not have an installer!
- The game should be played during the presentation by yourself; this means that, contrary to the other compos, we do not accept remote entries for this competition. (No, we won't play for you. No, Ryg won't play for you either. An additional advantage of having yourself play the game is that we can optionally provide a microphone if you want to comment on the events of the game.)
- You'll get around 3-4 minutes to show the game. Of course, we won't be very strict with that, but if you can't show the game objectives in that timeframe, that, alas, isn't our fault.
The game can run on any platform, but that said, there are a couple of things to consider:
- After the screening, we shall make the games available on the partynet, for the audience to be able to try it out. If your exotic platform makes this impossible, it might influence the votes in a negative way, given that people won't be able to judge the gameplay itself.
- If your game runs on a platform that's harder to screen (e.g. because the platform lacks a standard video output), make sure you contact us before the party!
- If the platform makes it impossible to follow the above rules (because e.g. it lacks a hard drive or cannot provide multiplayer), then of course with a proper reasoning, we will make exceptions for those rules.
Theme
Because of the demoscene's knack of working creatively with limitations, we decided to add a little twist to the story, and defined an exact motif for the games to follow:
The concept of the game must include circles or spheres.
What does this mean? The point is to have the above notions to play a major role in the game. It doesn't matter what role that is - they can be related to the characters, objects within the game, the playfield of the game, anything; just make sure the game has a lot of circles and spheres.
To give an example, Pac-Man wouldn't pass the test because the only spherical things in the game are the main character and the pellets. However, if Pac-Man would be played on a maze that's made out of concentric circles, it would be much closer to the above idea. Another good example is Freestyle's single player Pong - while the paddle itself isn't circular, everything else in the game is.
Of course, we will take this rule rather lenient, unless the game has really nothing to do with the concept - the point is to have some sort of common ground between the games competing, so the audience can have a common red line to make decisions about.