Sid Meier and the 48-Hour Game

MMBK writes "Sid Meier is possibly the most influential game designer ever, having developed the Civilization series, among others. This video documentary looks at his past while he travels to the University of Michigan for the 48-hour game design competition, which was hosted by his son."

Comments

Hi Everyone

[bazald]

I'm one of the three co-coordinators of the contest. You can find out more information about it on our webpage:

http://wolverinesoft.org/event/contest/48hourcontest7/

If you have any questions, I'd be happy to try to answer them.

Re:Hi Everyone

[bazald]

Anyone is allowed to write their own library before the contest and submit their code for approval.

1. We need to verify that any such library doesn't contain 99% of a game, just waiting for them to make a few tweaks to fit the theme.
2. We need to verify that the library's license allows anyone to use it for free, and allows us to distribute the games produced for free.
3. We need to give others time to learn how to use the custom libraries, or it doesn't matter that the licensing is permissive.
4. If we know what libraries are capable of, it makes judging effort a lot easier.

You're right that there would be some issues with allowing mods in such a contest, but no, it hasn't come up yet. Still, we would know that we can redistribute the mod for free. We would also know that a lot of work was done for them, so we would be able to take that into account during the judging. Perhaps we should officially disallow mods, but I don't think that making a non-trivial mod for a commercial game in 48 hours would be easy, so it might be an interesting challenge for some of our members in the future. It is an interesting point that the developers would normally have the game's sound/music/graphics available to them when making a mod. By the current rules, I'm not sure that they would be able to use the graphics, but we'd probably have to allow the use of at least some graphical assets provided with the game. We would ask the developers to make it clear to us what assets they actually created.

The only languages I've seen used are C++, C#, Java, and Flash. Libraries commonly used include SDL, OpenGL, zenilib, XNA, ClanLib, and SFML.

Re:Not commercially meaningful?

[Gadget_Guy]

While it's an intellectual challenge, and appeals to geek curiosity, how many really meaningful, influential games were written in one of these contests?

This is supposed to be news for nerds, please hand in your /. userid. The correct nerd response to a 48 hour game competition is "that would be fun" and not "what is the point". Some people do actually program for their own fun and not just to give you an updated version of NetHack. Anyone playing the games that result from these competitions are not doing so to find the next big classic game, but to see what people can achieve in a short time.

Sorry to sound confrontational, but I can't understand why anyone could even think that this sort of competition should end up with some meaningful and influential game. This is the epitime of the original, true geek. The goal of the geek is the same as a mountaineer: you climb a mountain or solve a problem because it is there.

Re:48-Hour Game

[Anonymous Coward]

You're also unlikely to win at Chess by making an early pawn rush.

Re:48-Hour Game

[Monkeedude1212]

When I read the headline I was certain it was referring to the time required to complete a single game of Civilization. I just concluded a single-player civ4 game on standard speed and spent around that amount of play time. It's certainly a change of pace from games like Starcraft where 2 hours is epically long.

Ha - Hahaha!

Man, I know I've spent Well over 48 hours in a single player civ game - and multiplayer has taken over 100 hours of game time to even reach a level nearing climax.

As for Starcraft, 2 hours isn't epic. I'd say 2 hours is breaching what one might call a long-ish game. A quick game is about 20 minutes. A regular game is about an hour. An Epically long game, which is to say, 3 players on an 8 player Map, goes from 9 pm till 6 am, with all players remaining till the last 20 minutes.

Yes its happened, and yes I have the replay.

Re:Deadlines

[pushing-robot]

I've boycotted cookie-cutter games like that. Same with movies. Do you know how few filmmakers bother designing their own quarks and leptons and stuff? The lazy bastards think they can just fill an existing engine with art.