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.

Comments

These contests fill a void

[Fulkkari]

I find the absence of comments rather odd on this article. Some people would say don't need these small games, but bigger titles. I disagree. Mac OS X has already quite many bigger titles. But small, simple and free games are a part of a gaming experience as well. When you install Windows (or Linux) you get some simple games to play with. This is not the case in Mac OS X. When you buy a new Mac you may get some game like Tony Hawk Pro Skater to play with, but I don't think this compensates the lack of small games.

Why do I then think these little games are so important? Because they can be played by everyone. Just think about Windows Solitaire. It is being played by members of both sexes in all ages. Can you say the same about Unreal Tournament? No. You can't.

These games fill a void.

Agree

[Lisandro]

Macs (and Linux PCs) are in this strange position; they're potentially great gaming machines, but they don't attract developers because the userbase is small. And the userbase doesn't increase, because developers don't make games for it (face it - games sell new computers like nothing else). Chicken and egg dillema.

Some major players have been taking baby steps to fix this (notably, iD and Epic), but the rest are yet to follow. In the meantime, whatever boosts these new plataforms aceptance as gaming machines is great in my book. Anything, even contest ones.

Re:Agree

[Lisandro]

But there is one player that still waits for its big success; open source games. There are lots of great projects out there that still needs to be finished.

Open source excels in one single area; the code, the software itself. There's a gazillon high quality 3d rendering engines, phisics engines, developement tools, audio codecs and assorted goodies that would make into a great game foundation. Still, the code is nowadays a fraction of all the work involved in a game; sadly we're far away from the days you could code an amazing game by yourself in a basement. Musicians, 3D modelers and artists are the major part.

Oh the other hand, there ARE a lot of very very talented unknown artists (http://www.deviantart.com/ , for example). It can be done, and i would *LOVE* to see someone coordinating an effort into a top notch game. Who knows... there's always room for surprise.

Re:Agree

[Lisandro]

Oh, and i forgot about the mod scene. Some of them have delivered some amazing content aswell.

Where is the code?

[mzs]

I 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. I cannot find it anywhere for past entries. I did not try too hard, but I did poke around for a little bit. I did look in about a year ago also and came-up empty. Also I could not find the binaries to the entries then either. This was a real issue because some of the entries were not available anywhere else on the net. The excuse I heard was that the uDevGames site was broken into and that the source and binaries would reappear after the mess was cleaned-up, but it is now more than a year later and I still cannot find the files. Where do I find the binaries and source code?