How About A Competition?

[Prophet]

I've changed my mind, competitions are born from desire to win, as quoth lord buddha, desire leads to suffering. The competition is held, everybody stops releasing anything until the compo releases everything and we'll suffer another 9 months to a year before anybody starts to release anything new and just when things are starting to come out we hold another compo and start the vicious feast or famine cycle all over again. I suspect the games may suffer from rushing to contest too.

Hmm... that actually makes sense. And I usually like compos.

With Pandora, I think the hardware possibilities will get devs interested, and a competition isn't really needed to drum up interest. In fact, a compo would be more interesting perhaps 6 months after launch, when devs have had a chance to get a handle on what's possible.

Talk of stealing devs is childish. Noone owns devs. They develop mostly out of interest/glory/?profit?.

It's not like a condition of winning the Zodiac was for yoyofr's GP32 to be smashed.

Actually it was. We just never admitted it in public till now.

...

I'm JOKING.

And yes, "dev stealing" is a ridiculous idea. New hardware is alwasy on the horizon, and nobody should expect their console of choice to last forever. Devs tend to move onto hardware that best suits their ideas, it's natural in any creative discipline to want to expand your toolbox.

 

[Sphinxter]

QUOTE

Noone owns devs.



Wish the agency I work for knew that.

 

[lubidog]

I've changed my mind, competitions are born from desire to win, as quoth lord buddha, desire leads to suffering. The competition is held, everybody stops releasing anything until the compo releases everything and we'll suffer another 9 months to a year before anybody starts to release anything new and just when things are starting to come out we hold another compo and start the vicious feast or famine cycle all over again. I suspect the games may suffer from rushing to contest too.

There is an easy solution, just give a longer timeframe. So, for example we say everything released for the gp2x between february and june can be entered. Then a period of judging and winners announced!

Or something like....

 

[Magnulus]

Well, I kind of thought the competition was meant to help people get going with the Pandora early on, so having a competition that lasts 'till june isn't much help, is it? It should rather be a short timeframe, like from now 'till the point where the first 100 Pandoras are ready to be released. That should reduce impact on the amount of releases made.

I do like the idea that any release of a new program between start of february and the start of the Pandora is eligible to be entered so that people can keep releasing their games.

I dunno, maybe I'm crazy here.
Earth Mother knows I'm not exactly the community's go-to guy for competition organising! ^_^
(I still am ashamed about that. Just so you know.)

 

[cowai]

TROOTH

 

[___]

Well... having sort of an open competition is a good idea actually. It also stops people from complaining that the compo will "make all the devs keep their millions of programs they could have theoretically released to themselves"... I hate all the whining anyways.

I will think about that. I am not sure if this is possible but it sounds like and interesting idea.

 

[Magnulus]

Of course, considering the time-frame that I mentioned in my previous post, I believe that if we are to start up a competition, it should be sooner rather than later; like the very start of february. All that really needs to be worked out is who decides who wins (I'd say Craig, Weston and Squidge), how MANY winners there are (doesn't have to be set to start with, I guess) and what kind of releases should be eligible for entry (should ports be allowed? Updates of previous releases? Emulators? etc etc).

 

[___]

Well, I don't think Craigix, MWeston and Squidge have the time to judge entries. Since I want to organize the compo, I'd like a team of volunteers in possession of a gp2x 200 to be judging. Also I would like a confirmation first, that the first three winners will receive a Pandora when it's released so I'd like to discuss this with Craig. This is however difficult as I find it hard to reach him at the moment.

A few rules for the contest could be discussed with the community, but I think that everything which is not a port should be valid.

 

[Magnulus]

Did you try sending him a message on the forum? Worked very nicely for me during the last contest. Might be a little bit more busy now, though. ^_^

 

[___]

yeah that's the problem... his inbox seems to be full at all times. tried it so often already... damn.

 

[efegea]

I wonder if you can use ripped sprites from a commercial game, in a game for the competition, because perhaps i'll continue remake from scratch my old castlevania project. But I don't have graphic artists and I'm unable to do pixel art, so I'd want to use ripped sprites from rondo of blood..

People liked my game, sad I was a noob at coding and the code was a mess. Now I have more experience..
And sad I didn't have any pixel artists who wanted to help me..

 

[efegea]

nobody? :S

 

[Magnulus]

If it were my contest, I would say you can't use copyrighted sprites, but it's not my contest, so I thought I'd leave it up to nopasaran.

 

[MWeston]

If it were my competition I would say no copyrighted material either unless you get written permission. It doesn't seem like a good idea to get anyone in legal trouble for something like this.

 

[Magnulus]

Hey hey! New tagline!

"I'd gladly get in legal trouble for a Pandora!!"

 

[efegea]

Ok, so no copyrighted material

 

[monkeyo2]

If you could put all the sprites used into one big image and posted it, potential designers could easily open it in Photoshop (or whatever) and create new ones on a layer above the originals (automatically at the right size and shape), and it should be pretty easy to knock up a new set.

I'm not specifically offering my services here (but if I like the look of it I might give it a go (slightly ashamed to admit I've never player castlevania)), but I suspect you might end up chosing between a few different ideas if you offered an easy way for people who can't do any programming, but know a bit about graphics, and want to give something to the comunity / get their work seen / have a got at computer game design. (May be you could run a competition :huh: )

Plus, I would guess, if you could automate the newly created image being turned back into individual sprites (I don't know if sprites are stored as individual graphics or one big one, but either way), it would open the option of easily re-skining the game later.

 

[efegea]

Well, althought I've started to rewrite the code from scratch...here are videos of what I got with the previous version.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS0IyZIpJKw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpZzecoQO5k&feature=user
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxfn1kZhsFY&feature=user

 

[efegea]

Good news, the game I'm developing for the compo (I hope there is one) is using gpu940, which is itself a subset of OpenGL ES. So it will run, and much better, on the Pandora.

(Well, if it was SDL it will also run on the pandora, but without all the advantages of hardware accelerated opengl )

(It uses opengl but is still 2D)

 

[icurafu]

That looks fairly cool.