Theme: I don’t think we really need a theme, but I liked the idea of showing off an aspect of Codea (that’s enough of a “theme”)
Submitting: I like using gists and the forum, keeps everything nice and separate (maybe one of the Mods could create a GameJam category?)
Threads: I liked the idea of having people do a “dev blog” if you will. Like in the Codea Cook Off, part of the scoring was posting code updates and snippets. I think it would be really cool if every entry tried to do an explanation, kind of like one of @Ignatz’s blogs. Especially if newbies later want to use one of these small programs to learn from.
Anyways, those are just some of my thoughts. It’s your show to lead anyways
@Monkeyman32123 ok, people who are super busy can start now to get a bit of a head start. The rest of us will wait for the update to drop… Unless it takes an age
OK, let’s start this thing on Saturday, regardless of whether or not the Codea update drops.
We don’t have any prizes as yet, other than being immortalised in a “Game Jam 2015 Entrants” page on the Codea wiki of course (looking at previous contests, it seems that getting prize money to entrants in various countries is quite tricky).
@Simeon what did you think about @TheSolderKing 's idea of one of the entries being bundled as one of the example programs with future versions of Codea? I could see there could be all sorts of issues with that, not least being that the example programs should probably have more than a week’s work put into them, would need to have a small footprint, not use any licensed content etc. It could be a special judge’s prize awarded to an entry chosen by the Codea developers, i.e. separate from the overall winner that forum members vote for. I’d be interested to hear what you think about it.
I think that just having a “hall of fame 2015” or whatever on the wiki though is probably reward enough, IMO.
My thoughts - at the moment it seems like a pretty open ended “show us completed games and give us the code” - if it is in this state the chances are you are wanting to post it to the appstore. I would much prefer to see a “challenge” type approach with a tight pre-defined scope. Something like:
Limited time (week at most) - it needs to be “disposable” enough to complete and move on rather than taking over from other “main” projects
A concise brief having a couple of constraints, including a genre. I feel this is important to allow comparsions to be drawn between entries (what is better Pacman or Space Invaders?), but for me more importantly to see how other people have tackled the same “problem” and learn from it.
Using only the supplied assets or ones created by the program. This puts the focus on game mechanics rather than producing pretty pictures.
Full sharing of all the code - linked to previous point but also allows people to learn
Bonus marks for code commenting and development blogging
Maybe include a very basic starter for 10 outline code to allow beginners to have a start point?
Possibility grow into a monthly competition with a new topic each month.
Sample topics could be:
An endless runner game
A top down shooter
A word/number based puzzle game
Any game, but not using any pre-built assets (i.e. graphics must be generated within code using line, rect, ellipse, etc)
A game using multi-touch gestures as an input
And so on.
The voted for winner could chose the topic of the next challenge?
However, you’ll notice I’m not stepping up and proposing running it (I’ve too much other stuff going on and can only dabble here and there) and it’s your original suggestion so run it how you feel will work best (what I’ve suggested is just my opinion). Good luck and look forward to entering if I can!
@West thanks for your comments. I think I need to explain my idea a little better. My saying “full” game is confusing, I’ll change the wording. When I said that, I didn’t mean highly polished and App Store ready. What I meant, I suppose, is that often, if we’re throwing something together quickly, a proof of concept say, we neglect the user experience side of things (actually, you often see this in full-blown AAA releases too…). So you might see a demo that is a really interesting idea and has a lot of potential, but it isn’t fun because the controls suck. Or it remains a toy, or an experience, rather than a “game” as such, because there isn’t a goal or a reward structure (although the question “what is a game?” is an ancient philosophical conundrum that I didn’t want to get bogged down in). Maybe this is because user interface and things like score mechanics are neglected because they’re seen as not very exciting to code. But I do think that even when you are prototyping and only have a few hundred lines or so, your project can still be fun to play, it can still be a game. So instead of thinking, “if I just add feature X, then it will be a game”, it can be a game from the outset.
Regarding theme, I’m reluctant to be too specific, setting a genre and so on (eg not long ago a suggestion for a horror themed competition was raised, but I don’t think there were any takers, maybe it was too specific?)
How about, given what I was just saying about the importance of user experience, we make a theme of “responsiveness”? Something where a bit of effort has been put into really nice, tight, intuitive controls. iOS often gets a bad rap on this front (particularly from the console crowd), but I take the opposite view that touch (maybe not so much tilt) has incredible potential. That way you’ll get to see different people’s approach to the same problem, but without being too restrictive in terms of genre etc.
I think the horror theme competition didn’t work out because it was for a 3D horror game, and not many people work with 3D in Codea. 2D horror would be much more doable.
@Crumble I think horror games require a lot more work then most other genres. I think that a good horror game needs a good atmosphere and vibe. This takes fancy music, art and graphics.
Well, Codea 2.3 is out, in some time zones it’s now Saturday, I declare the game jam OPEN! Theme is “responsiveness”. Think tight controls, feedback, reward, user experience. Post at the top of the page has been updated with details.
Mods, could one of you make this thread sticky, just for 7 days?
Someone already asked me about this, so I figured I’d let everyone know: If you want to use my Multiplayer class in your entries, please feel free (as long as @yojimbo2000 is ok with it)
Well, controls can be too sensitive of course. I’m talking more about attention to the user experience as a whole. So not just controls, but all of the feedback mechanisms by which we let the player know an action is completed, the rewards they get when it is completed successfully, the way that sound and animation contribute to that sense of control. All the things we mean when we talk about “the feel” of a game.
Entrants, can I ask you all, if you haven’t already done so, to decide on a title for your entry, and update the title of your forum thread to include the entry title. This is so I can put together the voting form on survey monkey.
And a reminder that the deadline is the end of Saturday, your local time. I’ve really enjoyed seeing the entries take shape, there’re are some really interesting ideas there I think. Good luck to all!
