Gamejams / Competitions?

[interstellarDAVE]

I have been wanting to get into making games for a while. I have been programming in C# on and off since college. Started to actually make some programs in Windows and WPF (XAML makes GUI stuff crazy simple for me) but then shifted my desktop to Linux primarily and hit a wall with Mono and GTK. In the past year at work I started using VBA for excel and PowerPoint to make somethings go faster and found myself writing little programs for automatic data pulling and chart / report making and I decided it was time for me to get back into it.

I never really learned the basics of game programming but I knew generally how it was done. I looked for a simple toolkit that would allow me to prototype games fast. Ultimately I see myself building everything from scratch, but its hard to create an engine when you don't really know how you want to use it yet. I've seen Lua before in games i play but never bothered to look at it. I found love and decided to try it out (partly because of the design aesthetic of this website, and partially because the wiki code looked really easy to make a game loop). And I'm glad I did. In a few hours, not knowing lua, I made a really crappy and hacked together asteroids clone that kind of works. I love this tool and really want to get to know it well.

And you know what the best thing that stimulates learning, work, and creativity? Competitions.

I propose we start game competitions, probably once a month organized but the community where we can work on projects with a common theme. These would range from proof-of-concepts to a complete game (between 48hrs to 1 month time frame depending on the scope). There will be some kind of theme for each competition that the community with agree on (lazer cats, games that rhyme with green, remake a classic game, make a game based off of a title that the random title generator creates, etc...) and might be some kind of restrictions that make the game design and creation more challenging and require you to be more create about how you approach it (only use shades of a single color, all graphics need to be created in the code, game has to be smaller than 100kb, needs to have some kind of simulated system, etc..). At the end of the competition, the games will be all available for everyone to play and then the community will vote on it and we will have winners. I would like that people update their progress through out the competition too so people can get insight into how other people work and we learn from each other.

Maybe we can even do collaborative games (using git) where we create a game together (maybe like the Amnesia Fortnight that Double Fine did) we all pitch idea and vote on the best (if there are enough people we can have multiple teams) and we work together to make a game by the deadline.

I created this here to poll what people thought about this. If people want to do this I would like a new section be created under Projects and demos so competition topics don't clutter up the area where people post their own projects.

What do you all think?

[veethree]

I do remember participating in a gamejam on here in the past. I think it was in march last year, Not sure what happened to that..We should totally have more of those.

[substitute541]

There was, last year. I think it was hosted by Stelpa. Although, it didn't really end, because there was so few competitors and most didn't submit their games.

[master both]

there was, it was called Lovefest: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=11453

[slime]

Veethree might have been thinking of the Märch Showcase from last year, although the webpage (and all other love2d.org jam pages) are broken right now.

[veethree]

Veethree might have been thinking of the Märch Showcase from last year, although the webpage (and all other love2d.org jam pages) are broken right now.

Yeah that's the one. We gotta do another one of those. lol

[interstellarDAVE]

What I'm thinking is more like Lovefest, an unofficial community thing (with no prizes, unless we get it going enough that we get sponsorship, but we're not even close to that now).

We can start talking about how we want to set it up. I read some of the old posts and it seems that a lack of submissions seemed to be the death of all of them. Besides winning, this contest should be about learning how to structure and code better and more efficent, getting outside your comfort zone and trying new things. So on that I want to suggest some rules.

1.) An entry does not need to be finished. Give it your best shot and get as far as you can. You might not finish it but you might learn new things that help you finish next time.
2.) We can use Github for all source code (we don't have to, but I would recommend it). We can then easily access each others code, see how someone approaches a problem and how they fix it.
3.) Regular updates on your project. Talk about issues or problems so other people can suggest fixes or discuss different methods of approaching the problem.
4.) Comment on other people's projects. Make it a point to check out all the updates regularly and contribute if you have an opinnion. Doesn't matter if you're an expert. Any comments are good comments as long as they are productive comments.

For the first comp I don't think we should have any restrictions. What do you guys think about themes? Anyone got any mechanic or gameplay ideas they want to experiment on? Here are a two that I just thought of.

- a game based off of a boring chore, making the chore exciting
- use a popular game title (like bioshock) and build a game using only the title as inspiration (so if I chose bioshock, i would make an RTS style game where you are a bodies cells and you have to defend the body organs from invading nano-bots)

[plz_m0ve]

Competitions sounds cool, but how about the noobs to both programming and Lua? Can they join too? If yes, im on. :-)