Why we dont have GAME development contests

[hbarcellos]

Just to take the other communities that I participate, the MSX community have at least three contests each year:

Passion MSX
Konamito Basic Game Contest
And finally MSXDEV

For MSXDEV (http://msxdev.msxblue.com/), community produce several new games every year. Just for this contest, the total number of entries (for all years) is an amazing 83! (http://msxdev.msxblue.com/gameindex.htm)

Any ideas about why that's not too common in the Amiga Community?

[hbarcellos]

Could it simply be a case of the MSX scene being much bigger?

 I'm not sure about the Amiga community size, but MSX scene is not that big. Most of those games are made by a small European group (Netherlands and Spain mostly). I should say no more than 20 ppl, divided into coders, musicians and gfx artists.
 My thoughts are:
 1) Developing a game on Amiga is much harder than it is on MSX
 2) There is a lot of other things you can do with an Amiga than you can`t do with an MSX. (i.e. WEB, 3d modeling and etc...)
 3) I think, that mostly due to complexity, emulators for MSX are far better than WinUAE and others. They are simple and filled with hacking tools like debuggers, rewind feature and several others.
 4) About ppl talking about making money out of a hobbyist platform, at the msx scene, all of the games are freely available to download. Some guys who tried to sell .ROM files were deeply criticized by the community. Normally the best games receive reals versions on cartridge with fancy labels, manuals and box. Those are sold, and everyone happily pays for them.

just my two cents.

[hbarcellos]

I think that creates a deadlock. Check this thread:
http://www.msx.org/forumtopic10560.html

 BTW, about the MSXDEV games, almost 90% of them were assembly games with direct access to the hardware chips VDP and PSG.
 About this part:

That's not always the case. I've met lately a guy developing a couple of MSX arcade games, just for the sake of it, at retrocomputing meetings here in Spain. He talks about complicated machine-code routines and hardware registers hacking in order to achieve smooth sprite movements and scrolling. His demos are impresive... but are the kind of things you could do with an Amiga using high (and easy to learn) level languages.

 That's one of the differences. MSX sceners found very fun tweaking the hardware to it's maximum producing things that would seem impossible at the 80s. Things that you could easily do with an Amiga using high level languages were for sure already made in the past (and probably much better).
 I think that the first step is this (as discussed at the msx.org topic above):

So, IMHO, they need first to accept the classic Amiga (500 with floppy and 512 kb of ram) as the Amiga machine to develop for as we did with MSX1 in the MSXDEV in order to try to create an environment that stimulates people to create freeware games that can be done in the time people have these days to be able to meet a deadline.

How nice it would be tweaking OCS to it's maximum?

[hbarcellos]

Commercial game development promotes professionalism and a certain amount of slickness in product and quality is required for sales. Why do you guys want to continue to work for nothing or for charity(bounty donations)? Am I being greedy for wanting to be paid for my efforts? And paying for the efforts of others?
I say jokingly that you gotta decide if you want to be a development capitalist or a development communist. Not everyone wants to be Mother Teresa.

Do you know what the word "Hobby" means?
 I work on a executive position in a large US financial IT services company. My cost per hour is considerably high.
 In my (-very few-) free time, last year, I converted some asm z80 games from Coleco Vision and Sega sg-1000 to MSX. It consumed me a huge amount of dedication. And I released all of them entirely for free. I'm a communist?

 Everytime you go fishing you try to sell the fish you capture?
 Everytime you go hunting you try to sell the meat?
 Everytime you go drive a go-kart you try to find a sponsor?

[hbarcellos]

That's what I was hinting about in my previous post, find a way to attract idiots like me.  Introduce limitations, and I'm all in.

Congratulations. That's exactly the point being discussed at the MSX community. MSXDEV is limited to MSX1 productions, even almost all of the community members having MSX-TurboR's (16 bit MSX)
PPL are attracted to challenges.

I should vote, as said before to: Plain OCS Amiga 500, 512k RAM 880k floppy. It's already a marvelous platform for games.

And to the capitalists, why not doing exactly like the msx community? ADF is free to download, but the retail version (box, manual, disk, poster, etc...) is available to collectors for a price enough to cover costs. I'm pretty sure a lot of users would buy those. It's a lot easier to produce disks than it is to produce msx cartridges...

[hbarcellos]

UP!
http://msxdev.msxblue.com/

Several entries just for this year...