Design Microbes levels and maybe win a prize!


_wb_

Microbe
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I'm going to participate in the DragonBox compo with Microbes. While I'm coding new features into the game, I thought it would be fun if the official compo entry would also have some cool new levels. If you're interested in designing some levels, please continue reading.

IF (and of course that's a big if) Microbes would win any prizes in the compo, I'll share part of the prize with people who contribute new levels to the game. I'll give 20% of the prize to each level designer, with a maximum of 60% of the prize and 6 level designers. This is only about the voucher part of the prize, since I'm not going to try to divide the SD card in case it wins 3rd prize. So if there are 1, 2 or 3 level designers who contributed to the compo entry, they EACH get 20% of the prize (so each gets 50, 30 or 10 EUR); if there are 4 level designers they each get 15% of the prize, if there are 5 they each get 12% and if there are 6 they each get 10%. In the unlikely case that there are 7 or more people who send me levels, only the first 6 will get a prize (first-come, first-served).

What do you need to do? First of all, send me a pm (or post in this thread) to inform me that you want to do this (the timestamp of the pm is what counts in the unlikely case that there are too many candidates). You can use the in-game level editor to make your new levels; the version of Microbes that is on the repo is compatible so you can use that one, or you can get a snapshot of my most recent development version, in case you want to use the latest features. If you want to, you can also make custom tiles, custom backgrounds, custom units, custom enemies, custom sounds and/or custom music to make your level pack more interesting - see http://buechse.openpandora.de/buchse/en/pandora-microbes-custom-level-tutorial/#more-498 for a little tutorial.

Your contribution has to be sufficiently significant: just one quickly made level that is almost the same as an existing level is not enough. I reserve the right to decide myself what I consider to be significant enough. When you send me something I'll be able to tell you whether it's significant enough or not. A level pack of ~10 interesting levels which share some kind of theme or story would certainly be significant enough; if you go as far as to make custom stuff (tiles, units, sounds etc) it will probably be significant enough even if you make only 1 or 2 levels. Extending the "Pandora" theme from the Buechse tutorial with some extra units and maps would also be cool.

Existing level contributors (Gadgetoid, Askarus, DREDD's 4 year old son) are of course welcome to participate as well, but the levels they already sent me before the compo started don't count.
 
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Sounds interesting but i dont think i'm going to have enough SD card space till after christmas, i'm totally full atm
 
You need about 10 MB of SD card space to install Microbes and have some scratch space left to save your new levels.
 
hopefully i'm getting my paws on a new SD card tomorrow, i'll see what i can come up with. Hopefully it wont be rubbish...
 
sounds like fun, we have some more levels, will play :)
 
have not forgotten about this...  my wife and son are away, but I can check and send you some levels any time...
 
That would be great!

A "Sean and his dad" level pack would be nice (there's a "Sean" level pack already, but it's a bit short, so maybe you could integrate it into the new one). Also feel free to suggest a name for it :)

End of the month seems to be a good date for a deadline - at that point I'll try things out and put them into the game if I like them; there's still some time after that to make some last-minute tweaks if you want to, but by the end of the month I need to have at least a decent draft version of the level packs.
 
late as always, I posted my son Sean's 28 levels, here:  http://sam.nipl.net/Sean-new.zip

they're not perfect yet, some are a bit unfinished, but it will have to do for now!!!

at least you can say, "a 4 year old designed 28 levels for my game, because he likes it that much!"
 
Thanks for that :)   to be honest I didn't play-test all the levels yet, but tried to make sure they would be interesting and challenging ...

maybe too challenging, I think!

We will make more changes to the levels later, make them look more interesting and colourful, etc.

Sean and I am going to an indie game dev meeting in Melbourne tonight, where we show off the games we are working on.

I will show my game, and Sean will show microbes with his levels :)   We're dragging mum and toddling daughter along too.
 
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