Vote for uDevGame 2002 Winners

Chris Burkhardt writes "The development cycle for uDevGame 2002 came to an end last night, producing 41 brand new Open Source games for Macintosh. The games are now subject to a public vote for the next 9 days where voters can judge them in 5 categories: Gameplay, Graphics, Sound & Music, Originality, and Polish. The winners will be announced on December 2 (along with the release of source code for all 41 games, and postmortems for the winners). Read the iDevGames.com press release, and the original article."

interesting...

[sporty]

Nice game ideas.. too bad their graphics aren't all they could be. Further proof that programmers prolly shouldn't design graphics :)

-s

Re:interesting...

[Chris Burkhardt]

Yes... well remember that most of the games were written in under 3 months... after the design and programming there isn't much time for the programmer to find and contract an artist (or a musician). And artists aren't free.

But that way the lone-wolf-programmers-that-can-draw-and-sing get rewarded (although there aren't many of them out there).

Re:interesting...

[Directrix1]

The really weird part is how they have to integrate Polish into their products somehow, hmmmm.

Re:interesting...

[Chris Burkhardt]

Well at first the iDevGames staff decided not to require localization in any particular language (though English was strongly recommended, while Spanish, German, Japanese, etc were encouraged). Polish was thrown in later for bonus points.

No, it is not Polish the people or language, nor is it polish as in shoes (not really, anyway). It is the subjective view as to how finished a product is. of course. silly.

LudumDare's 48 Hour Game Contest

[shredwheat]

LudumDare [ludumdare.com] just finished up another of their 48 hour game programming contests [ludumdare.com]. These contests require the author to create all the original game code, graphics, and sound by themselves in a 48 hour time period.

This time there were over 40 final entries in the theme of "Construction/Destruction" and "Sheep". The entries are open source, but a majority of them are written for Windows. About a quarter of the entries are written in languages like python and java, and will run on linux and mac.

After flipping through the screenshots for several of the udevgames entries, i'd say the results are comparable with the better LudumDare entries. Although i assume in the gameplay department, the udevgames have a little more going for them?

Voting is currently taking place, after which the projects will be revealed to the public. You can get a sneak preview of the titles by looking at the developers Timelogs and Screenshots [ludumdare.com]. Anyways, Ludumdare offers no tangible prizes, other than the respect of your peers. 48 hours is so little time to create a game, it's a weekend of nerves and development. Highly recommended!

Re:LudumDare's 48 Hour Game Contest

[Gastropod_ca]

Although the idea of rushing together a game in 48 hours seems amusing, I don't know if there is much value of open sourcing the code. I know if I was rushing to get a game done in 48 hours my code would be a mess.

In three months our uDevGames entry was over 30,000 lines of code(we had two people). Another game I glanced at was around 11,000 and involved a lot of math and physics. Some of the games have code for Mac OS X, Mac OS 9, and Windows. I think open sourcing some of these games will be of some value to the mac developer community. If you actually try some of the games, you'd see that a number of them couldn't have been put together in 48 hours.

Re:LudumDare's 48 Hour Game Contest

[Chris Burkhardt]

If you actually try some of the games, you'd see that a number of them couldn't have been put together in 48 hours.

This is true. And some uDG entries obviously were put together in around 48 hours (or they could have been :-). Lots of variety there.

Ludum Dare is cool, but I've been too cowardly to enter a 48 hour contest so far (and I'm afraid of Windows), but I bet I'll do it sometime. I love the themes for the contests, "construction/destruction" and "sheep" hehe. There was talk of no prizes for uDG too, and just going with good ol' respect (or a T-shirt), but as soon as sponsors started jumping on...

Bugs already

[Chris Burkhardt]

From the front page of iDevGames [idevgames.com]:

We are aware that there seems to be some trouble with our voting system. All data is still intact however, the system may report that you have voted for games that you have yet to cast a vote on. We will try to fix this issue as soon as possible. In the meantime, please continue downloading and playing the entries. (Keep a notepad handy to record your scores.)

Hopefully all will be fixed soon...