The "Finish Your Dang Game" Contest!

Mogri wrote


haha, well duh. But what I'm asking is larger than that. A game may be seen as complete if a player can play it from begging to end. But certain aspects of a game may not be complete. Like for example, a fully working battle system, character design and transformation/growth, etc...

Also a game may not feel like it's complete because some of the plot lines and questions asked by the game are not, in the end of the game, conected together and may not make sence (unless you want to leave your story open ended...), giving the player an uneven sence that they should be alowed to keep on playing but cannot. Theres a filmic term for this but I can't remember what it is right now...

So my question was asking HOW finished the game should be...just because you can play a game from begining to end doesn't initially mean that it is complete.

But thanks everyone for clarifying this for me...

i think all 'major features' like battle systems etc. should be in in order to call a game complete. but that doesn't mean everything planned has to be in, just that the game has reached 'v1.0' state and has things like a title screen, ending, credits, all levels, etc.

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Radical Poesis Games & Creations

I will try and help out with this if I can, James.

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Cornbread Chemist

Careful there, "v1.0" means "first released version" to a lot of people.

OOIA did it right. Bloodlust v1.0 was the first "complete" version. Of course, he sort of made up numbers for the intermediate releases, but he did get the 1.0 right.

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Mega Tact v1.1
Super Penguin Chef
Wizard Blocks

I'm sorry Machu! That wasn't directed at you. I didn't realize that Modern Magic was not going t be an OHRRPGCE game. Sorry for the confusion.

How will you be developing Modern Magic?



Yay for python! Yay!



Thanks! Right now I am still okay, but I am glad to know you got my back on this one :)

Leroy and I will be submitting an unfinished 48 hour contest game from what was probably 2004 or 2005. The unfinished one is not currently on this computer, but I will upload it later today for later comparison.

Entry's name is "Not a Drop" and hopefully will feature everything we originally had planned for it.

I am probably a kind of crap example for this compo. Most of my games are more like just toys than actual games, so it's more of a "start your dang game" compo for me.

Guys, you have choices for what game I will "finish":


A roguelike that attempts to teach you simplified chinese characters. Emphasis would be more on survival / crafting (like UnReal World) instead of dungeon raiding, because it better.


A multiplayer space combat sim, whose first version will just provide a sort of "Deathmatch in Space" experience, using Freelancer-style mouse controls.


This is a game that has stuff in it that I know how I want to behave, but I don't really know how to make a game out of it. You control a capital ship of some sort with turrets, fly around star systems with planets, and blow stuff up. Concentration is on naval-style battles with big ships rather than the more classical starfighters zooming around. These graphics wouldn't be in my version, they are borrowed from Arne's Starflight remake concept project.

The third looks most interesting to me.

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Mega Tact v1.1
Super Penguin Chef
Wizard Blocks

I concur. The third seems really interesting.

Would anyone object to the use of the nightly OHR build as the engine of choice to finish Not a Drop? We're hoping to use some of the new plotscripting commands to help enhance the look/feel of the game.

Also, would that necessarily be a bad idea? It always seems to run very stable for me, and I haven't yet experienced it breaking the RPG file or not being overly evil about backwards compatibility - for example, Partisan Legacy's RPG file was saved with a nightly from about four(?) months ago, and I loaded it into the latest nightly without any visible problems.

(If it is a bad idea, we'll try releasing the nightly version bundled with the nightly build used at the time for the contest, and release the xocolatl+2 version on the side. If that fails, then xocolatl+2 it is.)

nihilocrat:
I'd love to see more of the third one. The idea has the most appeal, and would provide the most innovation for the buck from what little I've heard here.

A lot of people do. It's customary to include the executable in your zip anyway so that people don't have to worry about which version to run.

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Mega Tact v1.1
Super Penguin Chef
Wizard Blocks

Posted old version of Not a Drop here:
http://minnek.castleparadox.com/entry/oldEntry.zip

Was apparently opened at some point after portraits were added to the nightly, as the final textbox appears to be a test of new features and has a (poor) portrait. Regardless, that's Not a Drop in its old state, and converted up to the nightly bundled with it. I'll leave it in my signature as well.


Thanks for the advice on bundling the nightly with it, too, Mogri. Seems kind of "duh" in retrospect, but glad to hear it's caught on quite a bit.

EDIT:
Figured I'd reiterate that this is an earlier and even more incomplete version that was still filled with placeholder music... but it's the best of which I could find a backup. Hard drive crashes are a bit ridiculous.

Okay, so people seem to want #3. I'm actually pretty motivated to do any of them, so why not?

What kind of game would be most interesting? I had three ideas in mind...

1.
A fleet battle game, maybe with RTS elements (but it's kind of hard to do hybrid action/RTS from a game design perspective). Two fleets of relatively equal power face off, you control one of the ships and can order around others, but there's no resource management or unit creation, but if gameplay dictates I'd add reinforcements.

2.
A classic trading/combat game, like Elite. Ships in this game would be much less specialized and more generic since you'd only have one under your control (unless I managed to implement escorts/mercs in time). Based on time constraints I would probably only do the combat portion, but might be able to have escort missions where you protect traders.

3.
A shmup of sorts. You navigate around a particular sector of space and have to destroy hordes of weak enemies with occasional stronger enemies. Something like Robotron, but with turreted cap ships. Maybe you've got to defend some target, maybe you can give other ships simple orders to help you out.


Also, with any of these, I am hoping I can add a system where ships are made out of a large number of parts which you can build ships out of in custom shapes and configurations. Perhaps these parts can be blown off of ships one-by-one, and perhaps you can recover these parts either to use on your own ship (kind of like Tumiki Fighters) or simply as scrap. I'm hesitant not because of technical hurdles, but because more complexity can make the game more difficult to balance and make fun. It's also wise to aim low, I've never really made a game that I finished ahead of schedule so even the simple stuff takes awhile to finish.

I need to drop out of the contest, I've become incredibly busy. In the next few weeks here, I've got a bunch of papers and a final exam to write up, then I have to move out of my apartment, move into another one across campus, and start up a full class load for next semester (which happens to start right when the contest ends).

Ouch! Sounds like you are going to be busy. Another casualty of real-life.

I'll take your name off the list-- but hopefully you will be able to finish your game some other time when the schedule works out better.