Why we dont have GAME development contests

[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...

[Karlos]

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

I think it would be more sensible to actually find out what the most commonly used base specification is rather than just assume vanilla A500.

[BigBenAussie]

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?

Good for you, I hope you got some enjoyment out of it and that it was appreciated. I really do. I must apologise for using the C word as it is a highly charged word (especially in America). Still, it was your choice to do this for no monetary gain as people do when they work on hobbies, and there is nothing wrong with that.

Others may or may not feel the same way, and it takes all types. But it doesn't change what I believe to be the reason that we don't have Game development contests(the title of the thread). We don't have Game development contests because people don't feel it is an effective use of their time. Adding money to the equation, may change that proposition. Contests attract a certain type of individual, that's all, while others may be encouraged by something beyond it being just a hobby.

But imagine if working on Amiga games for a living was viable, imagine how great things would be, and we wouldn't be talking about game contests for lack of games, because we would be awash with games. By leveraging the iPhone user base and market place, and utilising the SDL API for you game creation, you could potentially make a living off it and have produced Amiga games at the same time.

[persia]

Good suggestion, Amiga programming will never be profitable, but if you could easily port the game to iPhone, you've got a winning combination.  I like win-win scenarios....

[amigadave]

As far as I know, OSX PPC does not, and cannot run on the SAM440, but it does run on some people's Pegasos2 machines and they can run both MorphOS2.4 and AmigaOS4.1.

[Hans_]

It would be much easier to have a game creation competition if we had better/more game development tools. BigBentheAussie has suggested SDL, which is a start, but some sort of game engine would enable people to get started with creating their games instead of having to build their own engines from scratch.

My suggestion for someone organizing an Amiga game development competition would be to find a bunch of game engines, and create installers for them so that people can easily install them and get started. Even SDL can be a pain to get started with, because you need libpng, etc., in order to load images.

For the classic Amiga, maybe selecting something like Backbone (is it freely available) would be an idea. Is Backbone stable enough? Are there any others?

For OS4, I've seen Kore Engine, and SDL Game Engine (SGE2D) on os4depot. AmiDark also looks promising, but wouldn't be ready for use in a competition just yet.

I realize that those 8-bit guys probably don't have all that many tools; the difference is that they already have a community of people that take part in these competitions. Most of those have probably already built up their own library of code/tools.

A few other ideas:
- make it a "build it in a week" competition, so that people don't feel that they have to create a fully finished professional product
- Pick a simple game type, e.g., space invaders, and make the goal reinventing that game (i.e., not a simple clone)
- give people code for a basic working game (don't ask me where to get this from), and make the competition, polishing/hacking/enhancing that game

Hans

[yssing]

Backbone looks like a cool program, but it does have its limitations. No RTG and AHI, but it did have that, it could be really cool.

[leszeka33]

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?

Software for the Amiga should be paid.
You are a communist.
The Communists demanded that everyone has delivered according to the possibilities and took necessary.
Just like you.

[leszeka33]

Making software for iPhone and crosscompiling for the Amiga is a great idea.
Do not worry about some morons.

[desiv]

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

This gets my vote as best sentence of the year!!!



desiv

[DIBBEERZ]

I wish the Amiga had a super active game making scene

[/QUOTE]
16 bit coders went back to the 8 bit scene banging hardware old amiga owners come back for amiga os like aros like havin a vw camper with a saburu engine its just cool i duno to fit real slimed down code into 64k is a challenge or the boot block of a amiga floppy we dont need all this c++ nonsence i say bring back kseka assembler with a ramdisk an cygnes ed thats all u need ! oh an dpaint an a tracker prog ! oh hang on thats the demo scene or real amiga game writers !

[persia]

Don't really see why you'd want to change the engine on a T5, just order the Turbocharged Direct Injection 1.9 L I4 or the 2.5 L I5.  Turbocharging really helps these vehicles.  Most of the Trakkadus (Campervans) have the diesel engine though, which are cheaper to run.  Last year we were looking at getting a people mover and thought about getting a VW camper van, but at around AU$100K for a 2010 they're really out of my league.  

I wish the Amiga had a super active game making scene

16 bit coders went back to the 8 bit scene banging hardware old amiga owners come back for amiga os like aros like havin a vw camper with a saburu engine its just cool i duno to fit real slimed down code into 64k is a challenge or the boot block of a amiga floppy we dont need all this c++ nonsence i say bring back kseka assembler with a ramdisk an cygnes ed thats all u need ! oh an dpaint an a tracker prog ! oh hang on thats the demo scene or real amiga game writers ![/QUOTE]

[Tension]

This gets my vote as best sentence of the year!!!



desiv

You mean second best...

"What we're witnessing is the sad, lonely crowing of that last, doomed cock."

wins it for me!!

[ami_junki]

I think going down the route of limiting the hardware to the Amiga OCS or ECS would be fine, you could even just have a segment for OCS, ECS, AGA, for me the real Amigas are the ones that were made by Commodore and I for one would be well up for making a game on the Amiga.  Anyone want to team up?  I think that the problem is that people still feel that the Amiga should be viewed as a viable platform for selling games ... not any more, we are now in the same boat as MSX, C64 and Spectrum users so lets enjoy that status and start making cool games that run on old hardware which everyone has.  Even better limit the competition to using only certain tools.  Give people contraints and they start to think around the box.  So come on you old farts!  Lets get the Amiga gaming competition going and stop sitting on our arses complaining that there is no real value to it.  I am busy working but I will still find time to do my music which brings in no money to myself but I enjoy it and I can give something to the Amiga community.

[BigBenAussie]

@ami_junkiet

I think going down the route of limiting the hardware to the Amiga OCS or ECS would be fine, you could even just have a segment for OCS, ECS, AGA, for me the real Amigas are the ones that were made by Commodore and I for one would be well up for making a game on the Amiga.

Yeah, I hear you. It's hard to think of an Amiga as anything other than Commodore. Wish the names would somehow re-unite, if only for nostalgia. Say if Commodore could at least release a decent case for next gen AmigaOS machines. Can't say I like their current desktop cases covered with stickers...yuck. But I digress.

Anyone want to team up? I think that the problem is that people still feel that the Amiga should be viewed as a viable platform for selling games ... not any more, we are now in the same boat as MSX, C64 and Spectrum users so lets enjoy that status and start making cool games that run on old hardware which everyone has.

We're only in the same boat if you totally ignore next gen systems, which do have some sort of future. Not entirely sure what it is yet, but they are here and they are likely to be around for a long time, if only because of development delays. ;-)

Even better limit the competition to using only certain tools. Give people contraints and they start to think around the box. So come on you old farts! Lets get the Amiga gaming competition going and stop sitting on our arses complaining that there is no real value to it. I am busy working but I will still find time to do my music which brings in no money to myself but I enjoy it and I can give something to the Amiga community.

Ok. I'll give you a constraint or limitation. Get your newly constructed game working on an iPhone and win a prize. Not what you want to hear, I grant you. Look guys, I wish you the best of luck, whatever you decide to do.