Speedcode Challenge?

[11millionseconds]

Alright so I was sitting here thinking "what will ever come of the Collab thread?" when a great idea popped into my head.

What if instead of working together on one giant project we instead have a synchronized speedcode competition?

For example, if we were to say "Next saturday, everyone starts coding up a vore game at 7pm and for the next five hours (until midnight),
we just see what happens." Basically, we'd all get roughly five hours to code up the best game we can, individually. I've done some stuff like this
before and it usually ends up being pretty fun if you have people willing to put in the effort.

The benefits to this sort of thing are that you don't need to worry about long-term plans, planning out your project, or whatever. You do
maybe a quick outline of what you're going to do, and then do it. Pretty much like writing an essay in highschool (come on we all put it off 'till
the last minute). Also, you work alone, or tentatively with one other person. This eliminates communication issues. Also, nobody's waiting on anyone
else. It either gets done in five hours, or your project fails. There's no in-between.

The quality of the game doesn't have to be high, but in the end,
the project gets you two things: 1. It allows you to experiment with a different type of game then you'd normally make, since there are no unrealistic
expectations when you know you have almost no time to pursue them, and 2. If the project is finished and works, it gives you something to build off of later
or to take ideas from.

Also, if we really want to go through with this and have a competition, we could have some people agree to doing an "art prize" for the winning member or something. Just an idea...

[Teni]

Sounds cool, I'd do the art prize if you want

[Liz]

Hehe I can barely program as is - so ill play the result

Besides i think you time is a little different to mine ><

[11millionseconds]

Sounds cool, I'd do the art prize if you want

That'd be great Teni. If enough people are interested in this I'm willing to put up a page where people can register and submit their entries when they're done (instead of dumping everything into a thread).

Hehe I can barely program as is - so ill play the result

We'd also have the people that play the game (including other contestants) vote on various aspects of the game. Also I didn't clarify before, but it would be fair game to use anything around to speed up the game development, such as RPGMaker, etc. It wouldn't matter what you'd use, as long as you can make a decent game in a short amount of time. This way people that don't have a lot of programming experience could just use whatever they know.

[Ryu8]

Something I think you're forgetting to take into account are timezones. Not everyone who may want to do this will be active in the same 5 hours.

[ImaginaryZ]

This is the best Idea I've ever seen in the game thread. Kudos, 11millionseconds!

I agree with Ryu8, a quick and simple fix is to make it a 1-day challenge, so we can check submission times as day's instead of hours, it has to start and end on the same day, anytime within that 24 hours is OK. But I don't think anyone's going to get too upset on the strictness.

These kinds of competitions are perfect, because you could (just a suggestion) use tools like:

Flash
Game Maker
DarkBasic
Torque
Blender
Existing Game engines with level/character editors (MUGEN)
ect...

Just pick some day, and we'll do this!

-Z

[11millionseconds]

Something I think you're forgetting to take into account are timezones. Not everyone who may want to do this will be active in the same 5 hours.

I'm actually thinking that the rules would have to be a little bit different than "work from time A to time B." The issues with that, apart from what you just mentioned, are that there's no way of verifying that a person completed the project in the time given, and not with extra time. So right off the bat this is governed by the honor system. People can obviously start on a project earlier than the start time. It's possible to assign a specific topic to the games that won't be mentioned until opening time, but even then, lots of artwork and storyline is interchangeable and easily adaptable such that those who want to cheat are still capable.

With that in mind it would make sense to have a restriction such as "All projects must be finished in a -consecutive- five hour period on this particular day" The 'day' would refer to a day in a particular timezone, and anyone awake during that day-period would be able to participate. This also solves the issue of people being busy from 7 to midnight, etc. So the only restriction would be that you spend 5 consecutive hours that you declare ahead of time and commit to, and your deadline adjusts accordingly, so long as it's within the "competition day" boundaries.

I agree with Ryu8, a quick and simple fix is to make it a 1-day challenge, so we can check submission times as day's instead of hours, it has to start and end on the same day, anytime within that 24 hours is OK. But I don't think anyone's going to get too upset on the strictness.

Ah. You beat me to it
As for the actual day, I've just moved out of my dorm so my server is down and most of my stuff is misplaced. I figure others that go to college are in roughly the same place, with either move-outs or finals. As soon as I move in on May 10th I'll hook up my server again and put up a page for the competition. When we get enough people enthusiastic about this I'll definitely post the day this'll occur on. But "not for another week" is the general idea here. It'll probably take that long for most people to read about it, so it works out.

[Liz]

TBH I think i might be working with a simalar verson of VGame - but i will see how i go