indie game competition
polycounter lvl 18
Hey fools, darth vader himself, bobby kotick, CEO of activision/blizzard, announced an indie game developer competition. Big ass money prize which should be enough to get a small game developed to the winner. The best part? You need to submit a 2 page document, and a video under 5 minutes. That means no coding necessary, which means all of us artists can kick some fucking ass.
Prelim rules: http://www.activision.com/ROOT/media/sweepstakes/indie_game/Indie%20Game%20Competition%20FINAL%20-%20WEB.pdf
article source: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/27299/DICE_2010_Kotick_Talks_Passion_For_Industry_Debuts_Indie_Contest.php
Edit: fixed rules link. thats bbob
Prelim rules: http://www.activision.com/ROOT/media/sweepstakes/indie_game/Indie%20Game%20Competition%20FINAL%20-%20WEB.pdf
article source: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/27299/DICE_2010_Kotick_Talks_Passion_For_Industry_Debuts_Indie_Contest.php
Edit: fixed rules link. thats bbob
Replies
EDIT: Here we go:
http://www.activision.com/ROOT/media/sweepstakes/indie_game/Indie%20Game%20Competition%20FINAL%20-%20WEB.pdf
It's delicious. I love it. Bobby must be getting sooooooo much shareholder hate after driving guitar hero into the ground.
If an indie gets to launch a successful career off of this, so much the better!
I lol'd. And also, Kotick isn't Darth Vader (Vader actually had some redeeming qualities). He's Palpatine, only fatter.
On the other hand, this is Activision. They will almost certainly insist on owning the IP for whatever idea you submit to this contest. They'll take the very best, polish it up and sell it for millions, and the creator will never see more than the prize money. In a way its a nefarious scheme to get a shit-ton of R&D for free.
* Based on my brief experience with indie game creation.
Didn't Napoleon say something similar, though?
They wouldn't take it. They would let you develop it and then shut you down before you were finished....
Oh, come on you were all thinking the same thing.
1. do you know how hard people fight to find a publisher for their game ideas?
2. i guess you still harbor that dream of funding your own game development studio with the money you save from your day job huh?
Most indie games don't get finished anyways. And require some marketing efforts before/if they start making money.
http://vimeo.com/5895898
Idea's are a dime a dozen. ANYONE can come up with ideas.
Designing armours, fantasy worlds, Sci Fi Robots are not really hard, and there's a TON of people who can do that sort of thing REALLY well.
The difference is, some people have the ability to see their ideas through till completion, and most people simply don't.
Sorry if you think Kotick is here to steal your ideas, but the reality is your ideas are NOT special to Activision.
BTW, I can almost guaruntee they've already heard of some variation of your idea.
while I agree with your sentiment, I'll make an exception for this statement because I believe like almost anything you can name it comes with *practice* That is the key here, if you don't regularly come up with game ideas, and ideally make them in some form or other (think KP's board game for example) then the chances are that the first thing to pop out your brain will be.. sort of bad.
There's a game design motto that goes something like: 'get your first 10 games out the way quickly, because they will all stink'
Lets take mario for example. It's easy to forget just how game changing this title was, at one point miomoto wanted to patent his jump dynamic. Jumping in itself isn't anything amazing, plenty of games had it, but Mario made jumping fun, tuned it to have just the right ammount of control, speed, foreward momenum, all these small touches added up together to be incredible. Throw mario into any environment and the game is fun to play, because it's just so damned fun to control the guy, the game builds itself from this point. Tuning the movement and jump elements so a simple button controller could control mario in a very complicated but intuitive manner defined the modern platformer, in many ways platforming has never recovered from its move to 3d, they haven't perfected the formula of control as mario did in 2d so many years ago.
So the real trick to succesful gave developement, is to coming up with gameplay ideas that are fun and build on themselves. You really need both creativity and a filter for what's worth implementing and what's not worth implementing. True, creative ideas are a dime a dozen, but creative ideas that are doable and build on themselves to form a cohesive product are the bread and butter of game developement. Look at WOW, every system in that game relates to each other, leveling, combat, pvp, skills, items, crafting, exploration, etc. Each one of these gameplay systems are inherent to one another and any time spent polishing one area is going to make the game as a whole better. The same could be said for Grand theft auto, the running and gunning, the driving, the cop system, they all coexist at the same time, these are just a couple examples.
A great game doc will be a cohesive whole at the beggining, much like that TED video describes. "Thrash" early on, think of everything that's going to make this game great from the get go. If you can't think of the game systems necessary to make it happen or know you can pull it off, it'll never work, leave your dreams at the door. The best ideas haven't been done before, but are stupid easy to pull off. Blizzard is incredibly good at this, taking generes and exploring them just a bit further in all directions and ditching the unecessary unfun fluff and of course phasing these elements in over time so as not only not alienate players from the new systems and to give the product lasting appeal.
It's also important to come up with milestones early on. Think of very doable iterations that are games in themselves. If you only make it halfway to your goal, you still have a fun playable game with unique gameplay that can exist on its own if you polish it up. Once your gameplay systems are fun in quickly hashed together settings, you can be sure your polished up game will be worth playing. Don't develope all your systems at the same time, but develope them in a manner that they can accomidate more if you make it that far. The versatility will help you through all stages of developement, as the tools at your disposal are rarely what you were expecting, particularly for indie developement.
That brings up one final point, in indie developement, you need to be dynamic, roll with the punches, some of the best gameplay elements came completely from chance. Skiing in tribes is still my all time favorite and it was a total bug in the code, allowing you to gain great speeds when jumping repeadedly while coasting down a slope, pairing perfectly with the planned jump jet feature of the game. This "bug" defined the series and remained in every iteration since.
Anyway, I'm no pro at this stuff, only made one mod so far, but I am pretty jazzed about a game doc I've got going and hoping to get flushed out in the SC II editor, so this competition is pretty enticing on a personal level. Don't worry about people stealing your ideas as others have said, they're not important, what's important is your ability to execute those ideas and get a finished product worth playing. I haven't gone around posting my game doc not because i'm worried people will steal it, but because I know it's just immaterial right now. Untill i have some of the features working and tangible it's just a bunch of hot air. Had mario never existed and you proposed a game where you jump around on mushrooms and go down pipes you'd get laughed out of the room, but the devil's in the details, the stuff you can't describe over coffee. If you can make it fun, anything can be a hit. Listen to the voice that says, "damn if only they'd done this", and do it, don't reinvent the wheel, refine it.
Sorry for the super long post, been thinking about this stuff a lot the past couple months
I mean, the point of indie games is to give birth to ideas that a publisher would never accept or even try. Imagine if someone would pitch a game where "you are dwarves, building a fort, and you can do anything you want"
Indie, yeah right.
1 - I agree, its hard to find a publisher for all creative industries, a couple of friends are getting their records released on independent labels, and they are happy.
2 - It not that I want to fund my own game studio, just to try and get away from people with lots of money buying things and then ruining them. Greed destroys lots of stable businesses, this is a chance at an idea being developed - ok fair play, but its also a good ploy to get new IPs without actually hiring anyone.