A different kind of game contest?

myke on 2009/05/03 13:57

This pyweek got me thinking that there might be a different way to run game contests. Pyweek is one of the longest, 2-day and 1-day contests seem to be more frequent. While these contests are great for getting a quick sketch of a game idea out there (or in the case of pyweek, sometimes games of near release quality) they all end up being about "heroic programming". That's fun but it might be more useful to concentrate on using that time to learn how to manage a game project and come away with something that's useful after the contest ends.

What if the contest was a month long, but with distinct stages? Say after the first week there's a review of everyone's game plans as well as any playable code at that point. The projects could be grouped by divisions, the way boxers are grouped by weight. That way teams who don't have much time or are lacking key strengths wouldn't compete directly with the ones who are more "effective" ;) It might also convince some (or many) participants to drop their own ideas and join another team instead. After that comes 2 weeks of coding, and then another review before the final stretch.

I know this model won't appeal to everyone (it's got more than a taste of doing a game as a school project to it). Still, if I get some positive response to the idea I would run such an event. My hope is that such a contest would result in a fewer number of larger projects, with more interest behind them. Right now game contests generate a sad landscape of yet-another-level-editor and abandoned code.

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Comments

kent_turbo on 2009/05/03 14:21:

I think pyweek and pyggy awards are already doing this sort of thing - you can give up on your game and join someone (or just take their code and work on it) for the pyggy awards. And I believe there were cases when people joined teams after the theme was announced, but I'm not sure.

Tee on 2009/05/03 17:13:

TIGSource occasionally hosts longer game competitions; you might be interested.

I don't know what other longer-than-one-week game competitions there are; if anyone knows, please post. I'm also curious.

Something I'd really like to see is a centralized website for game competitions (current competitions, announcements, results, maybe forums, etc.). There is a thread at TIGSource that attempts to do that, but I'd like to see something more organized.

richard on 2009/05/04 00:03:

There used to be a gamecompo mailing list and website but the list seems to have been taken over by LD48 and I can't find the website.

And yes, the pyggy post-comp exists to encourage further development of games from pyweek. I'm leaving that in Greg Ewing's hands, so it's up to him whether we see pyggy #2.

bencoder on 2009/05/04 00:13:

sounds interesting.

Reading your post made me think of an idea.. although I guess it couldn't really be in a competition format and I would expect that no-one apart from me would like it - Randomly allocated teams for each section. So teams of (say) 3 or 4 for the first week have to come up with a game design proposal... then the next week everyone is shuffled into random teams and the teams have to program for the idea their team has been allocated.

It probably wouldn't actually work, but I would enjoy the experience if it did :)

Tee on 2009/05/04 01:25:

I probably would find an interesting experience the shuffling into random teams, but it's not so motivating to have to code an idea you might not like, and neither is working on an idea only to give it to another team. What might work slightly better is shuffling only the theme/idea seed, but these problems still exist.

myke on 2009/05/04 05:50:

being shuffled randomly into teams seems like the worst part of school projects. as for idea ownership, everyone can start by making a solo project (or more likely with their friends), and decide what happens to it. the review idea formalizes the point where you decide to quit, change, or keep forging ahead. if you drop out at the first week you've still got a pyweek game out of it.