Zero Punctuation Contest
polycounter lvl 18
Checking up on my favorite on-line cartoon, I noticed that The Escapist is going to be accepting submissions for the next month and a half for a Zero Punctuation game design contest.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/contests/register/stonkinggreatgame_09
The downside is that the contest is only a month and a half, which isn't a lot of time to design and submit a viable game. The theme for the game is pretty open-ended, although it is implied that you develop a title based on the Zero Punctuation web show. And the biggest drawback is probably the prizes. Slim-pickings here. The only concrete prize you get is a Zero Punctuation swag pack. (I'm thinking some T-shirts and other assorted merch) Not exactly a lot of encouragement to bring your A-Game.
Of course, if you don't mind throwing a little B, or even C-Game their way, there is the possibility of a certain degree of noteriety. The winner of the contest will actually get their game reviewed by Yahtzee, on the Zero Punctuation show. Given the general nature of the ZP reviews, this makes for a rather "Meta" twist. But then again, ZP has gained a considerable following over the past year or so, and having your work and name featured on the show would be some solid publicity.
For those hopefuls who would want to develop a 3D game, you probably won't want to try entering. The contest is for browser-based Flash games, not downloadable titles.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/contests/register/stonkinggreatgame_09
The downside is that the contest is only a month and a half, which isn't a lot of time to design and submit a viable game. The theme for the game is pretty open-ended, although it is implied that you develop a title based on the Zero Punctuation web show. And the biggest drawback is probably the prizes. Slim-pickings here. The only concrete prize you get is a Zero Punctuation swag pack. (I'm thinking some T-shirts and other assorted merch) Not exactly a lot of encouragement to bring your A-Game.
Of course, if you don't mind throwing a little B, or even C-Game their way, there is the possibility of a certain degree of noteriety. The winner of the contest will actually get their game reviewed by Yahtzee, on the Zero Punctuation show. Given the general nature of the ZP reviews, this makes for a rather "Meta" twist. But then again, ZP has gained a considerable following over the past year or so, and having your work and name featured on the show would be some solid publicity.
For those hopefuls who would want to develop a 3D game, you probably won't want to try entering. The contest is for browser-based Flash games, not downloadable titles.
Replies
They're really just expecting shitty little "I threw this together in 2 hours" games. So if you're willing to invest 4 hours, you've got a good shot!
Then wait for the angry reviewer at Zero Punctuation to be trolled by it.
Like those Super Mario game mods?
Yes, I noticed that in the contest notes. That was exactly why I suggested bringing your B, or even C-game. (ie, don't put your best efforts forward, or invest too much time) You can be sure that a lot of the submissions for this contest are going to be crap games that people put together using some basic re-skinned game template.
Of course, that means that there probably won't be too much serious competition, and a half-decent game that you throw together in a week would have a solid chance of winning. And it is a great opportunity for getting some recognition. Zero Punctuation has gained considerable popularity, especially within the games industry. If your name ends up on a ZP episode, and your game ends up on the Escapist website, there is a good chance that a lot of industry insiders will see your work.
I'm not going to advise anyone to spend a month and a half working on a game for this contest. It is not a serious competition, and the prizes are negligible. The recognition and publicity are the only real rewards.
That said, I am probably going to submit my own entry. I know a few shortcuts that would allow me to produce a pretty eye-catching game in a short time frame. Anyone want to hear some of them?
but seriously, I'm interested in what you have to say.
For starters, anyone attempting to assemble a Flash game using the Flash IDE is wasting their time. It is entirely possible, but the Flash IDE is not really conducive to constructing entertaining titles. Any decent Flash game is going to require programming, and the Flash IDE is a little crap when it comes to writing and organizing code.
That's where FlashDevelop comes in. http://www.flashdevelop.org/wikidocs/index.php?title=Main_Page FlashDevelop is a nice, free code editor geared toward flash. It provides a development environment similar to Visual Studio, only focused entirely on Flash. It handles all of the file formats and syntax that Flash and Flex currently use. In order to get it running, you will have to download the Flex 3 SDK from Adobe. http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Download+Flex+3 This is free as well.
Of course, even if you are set up to program for Flash, there is still a lot of work to be done. But we want to make a quickie game, and we want to get to the part where we develop graphics as quickly as possible. We don't have time to muck about with getting the basics up and running. So instead, we'll just use some freely available basics...
...http://flixel.org/
Flixel is an Actionscript 3.0 game library with a suprisingly solid demo-game. Figuring out how to integrate new graphics and gameplay elements into the demo game is very easy for anyone familiar with AS3 programming. This library also works very well with FlashDevelop.
With these shortcuts, you can go straight to prototyping and creating graphics for a Flash game in less than an hour. And all of the necessary tools are 100% legitimate and free.