[gameprogrammer] Re: Game learning project of the month

Robbert, I think you've got a good idea, and a better handle on what
folks can get done in a certain amount of time.

One of the things that I've thought about related to the use of GPL or
other licenses to encourage collaboration is also a requirement for
keeping a development log, or something along these lines. There is so
much learned through the process of game development that never gets
documented. It becomes "folk" knowledge, which is why developers often
make the same mistakes over and over again (and also why many
companies want you to have made a game, so you've made some mistakes).
Even postmortems don't really capture this. By the time we finish a
project we've already often forgotten how and why we did something in
a particular way.

Bjarne Stroustrup talked about this in a recent (relatively) interview:
http://www.techreview.com/InfoTech/17831/

I think this is especially salient for game dev.

Anyway, just another log on the fire.

Best.
Casey

On 1/8/07, Robbert de Groot <zekaric@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

I think if you/we ever get a game contest type thing going here
you'll find that 1 or 2 months really is not enough time even for
smallish games like tetris.  A lot of us have life and work to
contend with and would not have enough time or resources to even
compete other than maybe provide direction.  I know there are some
sites out there (idevgames a mac game dev site) have these sort of
contests.  Some even running as short as 24 hours but mostly only one
big one that lasts for about 3 months a year.  They may actually have
prizes for the winners as well.

Seeing that they only really have one contest a year, why bother
limiting it to 3 months.  Make it the whole year.  Start in Feb, end
in Nov (Two months off to recover.  Besides, no one wants to work
over the holidays.)  This way there will be plenty of time to really
polish the tur... the game.

One main requirement of the mentioned site was that any submitted
game's code must be open source / GPL for others to learn from.
Copyright is still held with the developer and the developer can sell
the game if they so choose.

Problems involved:
- Who hosts the game.  Ideally they should all live on a contest
server/web site.  This will probably impost a game size limit due to
server storage space as well as bandwidth.
- Some form of feedback capability so that the developer will
actually learn something from the users of their game.
- And if ranking is involved, judging and tabulating needs to be
worked out.

A lot of work to be sussed out and implemented.  I don't know if this
list wants traffic like this although it may actually boost the
traffic a little.



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