GAME JAM 2015: Winners announced!

Competition
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We have six entries for Game Jam 2015. [UPDATE] The links below are to the gist page. Click the “raw” button at the right of the page to go through to the raw page. You should then see the “COPY” button, if you are using the in-app browser.

3D Tilt Racing code / thread

Bridge Builder code / thread

Lilypads code / thread

People Popcorn code / thread

Spaceflight raw / thread

Squash and Stretch code / thread

#Judging

  • All Codea Talk forum members can vote for the entry that they feel best meets the 3 criteria below, as well as an overall winner.

  • Voters should play all of the entries.

  • You cannot vote for your own entry.

#Theme: “responsiveness”

Think user experience, controls, feedback (visual and auditory), rewards. Think touch and tilt. Think sockets.

This isn’t just about having good controls, but also all of the feedback (including animations and sound) by which we let the player know an action is completed, the rewards they get when it is completed successfully. All the things we mean when we talk about “the feel” of a game. This sense of how a game feels is often left to the end of game development (or worse, neglected all together), but the beauty of Codea is that we have that PLAY button continuously available in the bottom corner: unlike the desktop-bound developer, we can continuously test and tweak “the feel” of our games from the very beginning.

#Criteria for judging

The winning entry will…

  1. be a fun and replayable game around the theme of “responsiveness”; ie with special attention paid to the user experience, with tight controls and feedback, and some kind of goal and reward structure, even if it’s just staying alive or racking up a high score

  2. have concise and readable code, with a reasonable amount of documentation in the comments. There’s no line limit, but try to avoid code repetition

  3. “show off” some aspect of Codea, whether it’s Box2D, shaders, 3D graphics, sound, the newly announced sockets (online multiplayer) or iOS technologies like gyroscopes or system voices

#Eligibility

  • entries should largely be an original work created for the competition (though inevitably you will reuse bits of other code you have lying around)

  • entries can be individual or group efforts, but no more than one per person

  • you will retain all rights over your entry

Further suggestions welcome on all of the above!

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Im in

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You didn’t mention either the Anagrams or the Roller Coaster examples. Anagrams weighs in at 5000 lines, the Roller Coaster at a mere 400 lines. I did once extend the Roller Coaster into an actual game (where you tried to collect gems while going round the track). I’m not sure where that went to …

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Oops, sorry for overlooking anagrams! If you cut some of the colour definitions you could probably get it inside 1000 lines :stuck_out_tongue:

I didn’t count roller coaster, because I didn’t realise there was a game-ified version

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I would love to participate. I suppose, if @Simeon agrees, an amazing prize would be to have one’s program featured as an example, though examples are mostly for the kind of entries you described that you did NOT want(engines, examples, etc.) Not sure if this is feasable, but it would be great. Anyways, I would love to participate.

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@TheSolderKing yes, I was thinking that would be an awesome prize too. Codea immortality to the winner! (Of course, some forum members have already attained that prize…) If it were a 1000 lines it would only be around 32 kb, which would hardly affect the install size of Codea.

I did wonder though whether there could be issues with a certain company based in [cough] cup@rtin0, and their hostility to any app that resembles a platform for software distribution (of course, one you allow code executing apps, the genie is out of the bottle…)

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I do like the idea of short, simple, jam type competitions. Some observations:

Having a limited timescale is much better than a long timescale in my opinion. A week max is a good length. Any more and it eats up too much time IMHO.

Having a common theme works well - generating ideas for new games can be difficult. How about restricting to a genre and/or a theme?

Assets - I’m a big fan of using the pre-supplied ones only. This encourages learning about coding rather than producing pretty graphics. I’m guessing the point of the competition is on game design and promote use with codea.

Full(ish) demo games - I’ve posted a few here: https://gist.github.com/Westenburg including missile command, asteroids, an infinite runner, lander and snake

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I like jams, but I have a couple of suggestions:

  • A month is too long… A week or two would be better IMO

  • I prefer no line limitations, especially if you want nice readable code as with limits people will combine multiple lines leading to messy code

  • Only built in or code generated assets would be best I think, so it is easiest to share.

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Ok, that’s two votes for holding it over a shorter time scale, and for sticking to the built-in assets, both suggestions that make a lot of sense. @JakAttak You’re right about the line limit problem, you could get silly things like entire functions in one line. If we only have a week most people aren’t going to have time to write more than a few thousand lines anyway.

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On the subject of assets though, if you want to do 3D, having some nice textures is really key to it looking good, and there aren’t any texture images bundled with Codea (ageing concrete, old wood, scratched metal etc).

How about this: if you want to use external assets, you have to include code that will automatically download the assets from where you’ve stored them online, and they must not total more than 1 megabyte in size. That way, the code will still be shareable and self-contained.

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Any downloaded assets should also self destruct as well, ie there should be a function that gets rid of them when you’re done.

I once ran somebody’s prograsm that had 78 images, that I had to delete one by one…

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@Ignatz good point, I didn’t think of that! How about there has to be a button in the parameter area that wipes the images and closes the program? That way, if people like the program enough to keep it on their iPad, they don’t have to download the assets each time they run.

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For a theme, it’s probably best if we keep it flexible and suggestive rather than tying people in to a specific genre, I think.

How about:

“adrenaline”

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Maybe a Codea CookOff 2.0?

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Ok, I have a few questions.

  1. Is it OK to work in groups?
  2. When will it start(I think a good time would be after the next Codea update comes out…)
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Yeah, group submissions are welcome. Good idea about waiting for the update to come out.

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@yojimbo2000 I agree with a shorter time limit and no line limit.

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@Goatboy76 me too. I agree, because no line limit gives one the opportunity to write beautiful, clear code. Shorter time makes it an actual challenge, and so people won’t forget about it. I can’t wait for the next version of Codea and for this challenge to start, seems like it is taking an extremely long time, but I suppose that is just my excitement making it seem longer.

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@TheSolderKing I’m starting to have second thoughts about whether to wait for the update to drop. In the past Apple have been known to sit on them for weeks… What we could do is wait until, say, Wednesday, and if the update isn’t out by then just start the competition anyway? If the update does come out mid-competition it shouldn’t be too hard to make the code Lua 5.3 compliant. Unless, was there a specific feature of 5.3 that you wanted to use (sockets maybe)? If that’s the case, then I guess we could hold off until the update.

Any thoughts on the theme? I don’t think we really need one…

Thoughts on how to submit an entry

Before we begin, we need to decide the best way to submit entries. I think as this forum is really the go-to place for Codea, and because I’d like the winners to be voted for by everyone on the forum (using something like surveymonkey, as I don’t think we have a poll function built-in), I think the forum is the best way to handle submissions.

How about if, to submit an entry, entrants start a new thread with the title “GAME JAM: [name of your entry]”, and tagged “competition”, “game jam 2015”, and then post a link to the source code (in GitHub,[^1] PasteBin, whatever your preferred hosting service is), along with an image or a video, and a brief description (or even a mini-development blog, if you have time).

Depending on the number of entries, it could clutter up the forum a little but it looks as if there’s around 5 “ins” so far, so probably not too much, and it would only be for a couple of days. Having separate threads would be useful if people wanted to “announce” their entry, or troubleshoot teething issues before the deadline, and for discussion afterwards.

[^1]: With gists, the “copy” button in the inline browser works if you click through to the “Raw” page of the gist, which is super handy

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I vote no line limit, but I liked the longer time frame as I can’t compete in most competitions due to being too busy to make things within one or two weeks