Posts Tagged ‘competition’

  • Join the 16K Atari Inspired Retro Re-make Contest

    The guys over at 8bitrocket are holding a coding contest.

    The aim is to make an Atari inspired game, using any web-friendly language that you like, in 16KB or less.

    When they say “Atari inspired” they do NOT mean a straight port / re-make. But instead for you to take perhaps the core concept, or game world, or environment of an Atari game, and make something new and exciting from it.

    Considering how many excellent games appeared on both Atari home computers / consoles, and from Atari / Tengen in the arcades, that is a truly staggering wealth of titles to choose from.

    To get those of you who aren’t 99% Atari (like me) started, here are some useful links:

    Atari Arcade Games (134 games from APB to Xevious)

    Atari Games (another 68 arcade games, from from 720 to Xybots)

    Atari 2600 Games

    Atari 5200 Games

    Atari 7800 Games

    and of course, Atari ST games – here’s a listing from my site the Little Green Desktop, and another from Atari Legend.

    There are literally thousands of games to choose from, and remember you are not trying to port or accurately re-create them. You simply need to draw inspiration from them, and re-make them in a modern way. I agree 16K is limiting. But limitations breed creativity đŸ™‚

    The full rules / details can be found here: http://www.8bitrocket.com/2010/11/19/announcing-the-8bitrocket-16k-retro-re-make-contest/

  • Play & Vote the entries in the $10,000 Muse Games Unity Challenge

    Wings of Rage

    Back in August we wrote about the $10,000 Unity 3D Indie Developer Challenge that was being run by Muse Games. All they were looking for was “A Working Prototype demoing your game concept”. The prize was a healthy sum of money and a distribution contract. Although obviously they were looking for games made in Unity and not Flash, it was still great to see a company supporting indie game devs, regardless of their choice of language.

    Well it’s now time for you to play and vote on the games you think should win! There are 35 entries in all, and as you’d expect the game genre and quality of finish differs wildly. A couple of games caught my eye immediately – the first was Water Mania, which was supposed to be all about racing a speedboat against opponents around islands. Lovely stuff. Except it wasn’t. What it really was was a single boat zooming across a flat water plane with some terrain. Zero collision, zero opponents, zero game really. Still, it had nice music.

    A bit upset I moved on to the game Wings of Rage. It looked like a 3D WW2 combat flight sim. I’m a die-hard WW1/WW2 flight sim fanatic, and thankfully this one was at least playable. The flight mechanics didn’t feel like you were flying a plane at all, but the gameplay was fun, and I enjoyed blowing the enemy planes and turrets up. It had a lot of niggling issues, but we can forgive that seeing as they only had to enter a prototype.

    Feeling buoyed by this experience I tried another, the lovely named SpringyTurret. This involved dragging and sticking gun turrets onto walls, and chaining them together to blow up everything. Despite a quite difficult control system, once you got into it there was a true gold nugget of a game idea there. With more refinement I could see this one being really fun indeed.

    That was just 3 out of the 35, sadly I ran out of time to play any more but they did all look interesting for the most part. RPG games, puzzle games, racing games and several FPS style are all represented. The quality of them is no higher than the sort of games I have judged many times in TGC competitions over the years (the Alienware compo being an especially good one). But it’s still early days for Unity in the browser, and it’s exciting to see where it may be headed.

  • $10,000 Unity 3D Indie Developer Contest

    I’ve never blogged about Unity before, not because I’ve got anything against it, but just because I’ve no real commercial interest until it gains a lot more mainstream use. However I know a lot of you guys wear both your Flash and Unity caps depending on project, and when this press release from MuseGames landed in my inbox I figured it was only fair to give them a shout. The following is cut ‘n pasted verbatim, so don’t forget to do some research yourself to see if it’s worth the effort – but the prize certainly sounds sweet enough.

    Muse GamesNEW YORK, NY – Muse Games (musegames.com), a growing portal for browser-based 3D gaming, today announced the launch of “Immunity,” an indie game development challenge based on the Unity 3D (unity3d.com) engine. Contestants can submit a simple game prototype to be voted on by the development community and general public, and ultimately compete for a $10,000 contract to finish the game for distribution on musegames.com and beyond.

    Full contest details and a sample concept can found at http://musegames.com/community/immunitychallenge

    Both professional and non-professional individuals, or teams, are being asked to submit simple Unity-based prototypes demoing their game concept. Voting participants will then be able to play the game and judge its primary mechanic. The top 5 concepts will be granted “immunity” and evaluated by the Muse team. Submission will take place between 8/25 and 10/15, with the $10,000 grand prize winner being announced at the UNITE Unity 3D development conference in San Francisco, Oct 27-30. Participants and spectators will be able to track the progression of the winning game concept to completion on the Muse Games blog.

    “As Indie developers ourselves, we believe strongly in the Indie community and want to reward developers for making great games,” says Co-Founder Austin Lane. “Hopefully we can make this model a successful one for the future, and ultimately raise the stakes on browser-based indie development.”

    MUSE GAMES LAUNCHES “IMMUNITY,” A $10,000 UNITY3D-BASED INDIE GAME DEVELOPMENT CHALLENGE

    Competition provides aspiring game developers with unique opportunity to finance their game idea, and lends support to nascent browser-based 3D gaming industry

    NEW YORK, NY – Muse Games (musegames.com), a growing portal for browser-based 3D gaming, today announced the launch of “Immunity,” an indie game development challenge based on the Unity 3D (unity3d.com) engine. Contestants can submit a simple game prototype to be voted on by the development community and general public, and ultimately compete for a $10,000 contract to finish the game for distribution on musegames.com and beyond.

    Full contest details and a sample concept can found at http://musegames.com/community/immunitychallenge

    Both professional and non-professional individuals, or teams, are being asked to submit simple Unity-based prototypes demoing their game concept. Voting participants will then be able to play the game and judge its primary mechanic. The top 5 concepts will be granted “immunity” and evaluated by the Muse team. Submission will take place between 8/25 and 10/15, with the $10,000 grand prize winner being announced at the UNITE Unity 3D development conference in San Francisco, Oct 27-30. Participants and spectators will be able to track the progression of the winning game concept to completion on the Muse Games blog.

    “As Indie developers ourselves, we believe strongly in the Indie community and want to reward developers for making great games,” says Co-Founder Austin Lane. “Hopefully we can make this model a successful one for the future, and ultimately raise the stakes on browser-based indie development.”

    About Muse Games:
    Muse Games was founded in 2008 to bring 3D multiplayer casual gaming to the internet’s doorstep. The web platform launched in May ’09 and has been growing its game catalog and adding features since. Recently Muse has opened up to outside developers who wish to increase the exposure and monetization capability of their Unity 3D games.

  • (Spoiler!) Play test my 4kb Game Competition entry

    My 4kb Game Competition entry is very nearly finished. I’m in the final “tweaking” stages, trying to get the last few small bugs out, and iron the gameplay a little so it’s less “random” and even more progressive.

    The game is a twitch shooter based (loosley!) on Geometry Wars and requires some pretty mad flying skillz to last more than 30 seconds. The idea is literally to see what kind of score you can get. Here’s a screenie:

    Infinite Ammo

    There are 10 different baddies, “boss waves”, bullet power-ups and particle explosion effects galore! (I went a bit over the top in all honesty). I’d love to have added sound, but I’m pushed to the limit of my 4096 bytes shackles already.

    I know the game isn’t quite as “playable” as it should be, and I’ll work on that in the final few days left before I need to submit to the contest. I also know I don’t have a chance of winning (having seen some of the other entries lined-up!), but it was bloody great fun to code anyway.

    And so as a sneak peak to you here’s the latest beta to play. Comments welcome (but please do bear in mind this whole game had to fit into 4096 bytes, so don’t go requesting anything insane ok?!)

  • Made in 4 hours – You Dirty Rats!

    Tonight was the first FlashGameLicense.com coding competition.

    You had 5 hours to create a game based around the theme of “Lies” (you were free to interpt that theme however you wanted).

    I was late to start, so only had 4 hours, but here is my end result đŸ™‚

    The competition winners should be announced on Monday. I don’t expect to win (some of the other entries were brilliant!) but it was great taking part all the same.