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uDevGames 2004 Macintosh Game Development Contest
Chris Burkhardt writes "iDevGames officially announced the start of the uDevGames Game Development Contest yesterday. The contest challenges participants to create a Mac OS X game in three months time, which will then be subjected to public vote, peer vote, and a panel of judges, with the best in a variety of categories receiving prizes. iDevGames has issued a press release." Previous winners of the competition include the rather smart Argonaut 2149.
Check out this thread for links to developers' pages. Hopefully, they'll have the download section on the site soon.
Hello, I am editor of iDevGames, the site behind uDevGames.
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:( (We were on a dedicated server.) To make a long story short, we just don't have the bandwidth to handle our large download section at the moment (we also offered lots of free game assets). Once some sugar daddy decides to step in, I win the lottery, or our donations increase, then we can move to a better home.
>I find the absence of comments rather odd on this >article.
Perhaps being on the front page would have helped. I recall making the front page in 2001, just when we announced the first contest. How do I pull some strings?
>Some people would say don't need these small >games, but bigger titles.
This raises some good points, and many good replies on the subject.
I will take a different track. My feelings is that too many small developers try to make the "next big thing", and every so often (not often), they succeed, like Myst. But for the most part, they get no where. Having a contest that makes them focus, stay on track, and COMPLETE a game is vital for their education, building their source code library, and for getting their name out. All this leads to them working towards better games -- big and small.
>maybe it would give "script kiddies" and virus >writers a chance to prove themselves
Like giving a gallery to a graffiti artist?
This reminded me of back in the 80's when "some" pirates or demo makers (not to bunch the two together, though often pirates used demo intros) on the Amiga and ST moved into making their own games. Anyhow, I agree, as a site that was attacked by these script kiddies. Such a waste of time, when they could be making "fun stuff."
>Super breakout 3 coming?!
This comment leads me to think that perhaps someone hasn't seen the level of the games in 2002, and 2003 of the contest. Sure, you are bound to get a Pong game or two -- and very likely to get Tetris, but to WIN, you need to show a polished game, something that would easily do well in the shareware market. I ask you to check out the winning games of uDevGames -- I am sure you will be impressed. The contest isn't about making a ton of breakouts. Hopefully when things settle down a bit, we can work on adding more detail to past entries on the site.
>read that one of the aspects of this contest is >that the source code for all of the entries will >be made available on the uDevGames site.
Yes this is true. It is the core concept of uDevGames and what sets it apart from those "other contests." We have posted source code up to 2002. However, as the reply mentioned, thanks to script kiddies, we had a really rough time in 2003. Two attacks which made the site resort to using virtual hosting.
Again, you can find most of the code by asking in our forum, which is a great community, if I may say so.
Last point I wanted to bring up, which seems not to have been covered in the Slashdot posting.
In the past we allowed any type of license, including one of our own, which restricted the use of the code to only "educational purposes." This year, I decided to make it mandatory to use any of the OSI approved licenses. I thought that in the long run, the community would be better off. I also thought that it would be a great "shot heard across the Linux world" and open source communities -- as we aren't just dreaming of making a difference, we are DOING, but sadly it seems, with the exception of Slashdot, most of the Open source community is silent on uDevGames, which is a shame, because many Linux game devs could be working on entries, via cross-platform APIs, like SDL.
Cheers,
Carlos