Why we dont have GAME development contests

[skurk]

I don't know if it's such a good idea to host a competition. There might not be enough entries. I'm sure the people who actually want to make Amiga games will want to make them without needing to be offered the chance of a reward from a competition.

I'd bite if the competition had some sort of a challenge, or interesting twist to it.  Well, other than making a game.

For example: 4k, boot block, text based, no bitplanes, etc.. :-)

[skurk]

The only reason you want a game development contest is because there is no commercial game market. That is the real problem. You want to motivate game developer's via ego rather than money. That's fine, of course, but ego won't put food on the table.

There is no commercial game market, because no one wants to pay for a game on such an antique platform.  And, even if everyone did, it would not even cover a fraction of the efforts required.  I say we keep things free, we're all friends here.

In my opinion, one of the problems is that the Amiga is too easy to program.  Compared to the C64, you don't need double interrupts to get a stable raster, and you don't need to time the hell out of a loop to open the borders or multiplex a few sprites.  Coding the Amiga is in fact so easy, it's no fun making "ordinary things" on it anymore.  That's one of the reasons I'm sticking to the demoscene, to push the hardware instead of just scrolling playfields and checking for sprite collisions.

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.

[skurk]

The Communists demanded that everyone has delivered according to the possibilities and took necessary.

Well, I happen to know a thing or two about communism, and... well, just... uh, no.  Stop talking.

Politics aside, and (almost) back to the thread: I like the idea of a time or size limited production; where quality isn't necessarily top priority.  No reason to raise the bar too high just yet.

- How many out there are capable of making a simple game?  If it's just one or two, there's no point in having a compo...

- To make things interesting for everyone, should we have a bounty?  I can contribute with a couple of €'s or some old hardware.

- What set of rules, limitations?  Who will decide the winner?

[skurk]

You are wrong.
Optimization for the weaker Amiga is boring, tedious and meaningless work.

You are joking, right?  That's the *essence* of fun - tweaking the underpowered Amiga to do things you would never expect from it.  Just like the C64 demos out there today.  Have a looksie, you'll be surprised.

Why I am in my spare time, I have to do some shit, if I can do nice and cool games?
Because it will not work on slow Amiga?
Buy a faster hardware running Amiga OS.

...but, but, but not everyone have that kind of hardware.  In fact, all such hardware in existence is already in use.  What we DO have, however, is a basic platform - the OCS A500.  If it is written well and runs there, it will run on every 68k Amiga.  I think that's pretty fair.