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

[Fulkkari]

Major players are indeed very cautious moving onto Mac and Linux. There is the fear that the revenues from the new supported platforms will not compensate the money used in new investments like hardware and training. Especially when the competition in the market becomes harder and harder, a misstep can be fatal for smaller companies. It will most likely require a big success by one company before the others will follow.

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. A success here could wake up companies as well. The reason why a open source game could trigger investments on new platforms rather than commercial games is that open source developers doesn't maybe care about the current userbase as much. A great deal of the open source projects don't have any userbase at all, to be honest, but still people work on it. But there will always be some breakthroughs. Maybe not in this contest, but still.

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.

Re:Agree

[ageitgey]

The parent post is correct in that modern games are much, much harder to create than old side-scrollers from the 80s. And you are correct that despite that fact, it would be possible to find everyone with the correct skills to form a team and still produce a quality product even today.

But there is another piece to the puzzle. Most games are played through only once or twice by a player. iD software put 4 years into Doom 3 and many people went on to finish the game in a single day.

The artists at iD probably put hours and hours of work into each and every room, pipe, box, etc in Doom 3. The art/level development process probably goes something like this:

1. Design a level on paper
2. Get the rough rooms modeled
3. Start texturing the rooms
4. Start adding decorations, crates, etc.
5. Populate it with monsters, supplies, etc.
6. Revise many times.

Now, just like testing software, they would have to test each level to make sure textures line up, actions trigger, difficulty is appropriate, and so on. It works just like testing versions of software, from development, to debugging, and then release.

Unfortunately, "content-based" games are pretty much a one time experience. You can't experience a game on an emotional level if you are playing through the same level hundreds of times to see minor improvements and new features. That works for spreadsheets and word processors, not games.

In other words, the open-source development process pretty much does not work for "content-based" games. In an application, a user will send you a patch to add a feature they really needed and took the time to create. And if the program really helps them do a job, they might keep working on it to make it better. In the case of a game, a game player is going to say "this game sucks", not send you a patch to relocate decorations in a level in order to increase the moody atmosphere. Or atleast they won't keep sending patches over any period of time. They will quickly lose interest, because they have completed the game experience.

Open source/Free/etc software makes sense because it allows the very intense, but globally tiny work of a few people to benefit all indefinately. If you create a really useful spreadsheet, businesses can benefit for years to come. The benefit of the work is ((users * useful_lifespan) - work_to_create). That model just doesn't make sense for most game development because the useful life span is very short.

The only case where it does work well is in multiplayer games. In those cases, the games can be fun for months or years. And that is exactly were projects like this have succeeded wildly (Counterstrike!).

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?

Re:Where is the code?

[MonaXier]

Check out this thread for links to developers' pages. Hopefully, they'll have the download section on the site soon.