Cross Platform Competition Concept and Discussion

TrekkiesUnite118

Established Member
So I brought this up in a few discords and figured I'd make a thread to discuss the idea, get some feed back, flesh it out, refine it, etc.

Basically I was thinking about doing another FMV competition, but the more I thought about it I began thinking that it might be more fun and interesting to expand the scope to something more. The idea would be to instead do a team based cross platform game development competition. The general idea would be as follows:

  • Each homebrew scene would effectively be it's own single team.
    • Instead of individual entries for say Saturn, 3DO, N64, PSX, etc, we'd have one entry for each scene with the entire scene working together as a team and contributing. So 1 entry for Saturn, 1 entry for 3DO, etc.
    • No one would be forced to drop what their doing and participate, but people could have the opportunity to contribute whatever they felt up to at their own time.
  • Each team would effectively be working on developing the same game.
    • Overall design and concept would be proposed and voted on prior to the start of the competition
    • Common art and assets could be created by a core team of artists
    • Each team would then have to work on bringing that concept to life on their system.
    • General goal is to recreate the environment of multi-platform game development of the era, where you could sometimes get the same game on 2 different systems, but with radically different approaches/implementations that worked to each systems strengths.
  • The competition could be set over a longer period of time (6 months to 1 year?) to give developers the chance to work at their own pace and deal with managing the issue of balancing real life, distributed teams, etc.
    • During this time each team has to go from design concept to a playable game.
  • Overall ranking would be based on how well the finished product reflects the original designs, what unique features each system shows off, etc.
The overall goal is to see what each scene could produce working as a team on the same general game and see how we all stack up against each other. It was pretty fun an interesting to see this play out in the FMV competition last year as well as seeing the general comradery and helping each other out across the different dev scenes. So I was thinking this could be something fun that could promote those same kind of things in something more than just FMV playback competition. It could also just give some devs that are getting burnt out on their current projects a chance to get some fresh air and recharge their batteries so to speak.

So overall I was curious what people's thoughts were on doing something like this, and if there were any suggestions to flesh it out and refine it? Some examples from what feedback I've heard:
  • Are there any genres that should be flat out vetoed before they're even proposed? (Ex: Role Playing Games might be too massive in scope).
  • How long is too long for the competition?
  • Can people participate in more than one team?
 
Great initiative! With the growing interest in homebrew and retro of late, all communities will benefit of this competition. From my vision, it can give a kick-start the formation of strong development teams that will share knowledge with the community.

I'll be in 3DO team as a programmer, there are talented developers in this community who might also want to join the competition. But we will need quad distortion enjoyer artist and game designer.

6 months should be enough. After all, even a beta version will allow you to see the project prospects.

Will game design be the same for all projects? Or do the teams decide for ourselves which projects will best fit into the limitations of the platform?

If it's a Gen5 homebrew scene competition, then I would list 3D as a must.
 
Will game design be the same for all projects? Or do the teams decide for ourselves which projects will best fit into the limitations of the platform?
The overall game design will be the same for all projects, but each team has the freedom to implement that design how they feel it best fits their hardware. So for example if the overall design is a First Person Shooter, the overall design would layout the overall game play, setting, desired art style/look, plot/level progression, general map layouts/ideas, etc. But how each team wants to implement that is up to them. So you may get different interpretations of a level, different textures, lighting approaches, etc. So kind of like how Quake 2 is radically different between PS1 and N64, or how Duke 3D is different across Saturn, PS1, and N64, etc.
 
I'll be in 3DO team as a programmer, there are talented developers in this community who might also want to join the competition. But we will need quad distortion enjoyer artist and game designer.
I can help with the art/texture work, with another person or without. I guess that leaves room for 3D modelling and whatever other support for design of sorts.
 
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