Weekly FB game compo - feedback request

[darkhog]

I've got some nice idea. How about weekly compo where every week I'll give you game theme (this can be anything from gfx theme to gameplay theme or even genre). Theme will be given every Monday starting from October 17th. You'll have 5 days (Monday-Friday inclusive) to make game, weekend will be reserved for voting (voting process will be purely democratic by forum poll) and code will have to be attached to submission (only FB code accepted). Participant will be allowed to submit as many games as he want, but they cannot share graphical and sound resources and be too similar (e.g. two space invaders-like games where the only change are sounds and graphics).

Why start in October 17th? Because as these forums aren't very popular (post/day rate is very low), I need to get some feedback on this and to next Monday there's is too little time.

To even succeed, I'll need at least three participants willing to make games on compo. There won't be any rewards except feeling that your game was good and other people liked it.

[Lachie Dazdarian]

I'm not confident that it will work. Speaking as someone who organized several competitions with CASH awards in this community. Check FBGD past competitions here: http://games.freebasic.net/competitions.php

Another one is planned soon.

I would recommend that you run it parallel in both forums, though. Nobody will mind.

I'm just not sure what sort of response you will get as this is not a prolific game making community. This would work better in some community based on a game maker (like Multi Media Fusion communities), or on some popular indie game dev site. I just don't think we have a critical amount of game developers (at this point of time) for these sort of short competitions to work. We are simply not a rapid game developing type of crowd. But this is only guessing, as I never tried. I only know that with competitions that I let run for usually two months, the community had difficulties producing more that 3 valid entries.

What I can say is that a lot of programmers in our community like programming challenges and toy-like programs (over complete games), so if you go in that direction, you might get a good response, but I doubt you will get many games with external graphics or proper presentation produced (in a mere week time).

Try, if you really have an interesting theme, advertise in both forums, but don't expect much.

Personally, I would recommend getting know with the rhythm/feel of the community first, maybe participate in my upcoming competition, before trying to organize something yourself.

[ssjx]

I'm not confident that it will work. Speaking as someone who organized several competitions with CASH awards in this community. Check FBGD past competitions here: http://games.freebasic.net/competitions.php

Another one is planned soon.

I thought you had finished running competitions? ( http://games.freebasic.net/forum/index.php?topic=76.msg5616#msg5616 )

Glad to hear that is not the case then!

[Lachie Dazdarian]

I meant "closing" as in sense...closing near. Now, why didn't I use the word "approaching". All in all, the next compo will definitely start during November. And it will probably feature a 300 $ first prize.