A Whirlwind of Game Design 19
conq writes "BusinessWeek has a feature on the videogames design students were able to create in 24 hours. From conception to completion. The games are quite basic but it is fascinating what they are able to come up with in so little time. From the article: 'The teams' challenge was to collectively create a mobile-game masterpiece using a "mystery ingredient" -- random verbs and nouns -- to guide design.'"
Sounds familar (Score:4, Informative)
The annual SpeedHack competition has been around for six years already. The only difference is 3 days vs. only 1 day.
Re:Sounds familar - yours too! (Score:3, Funny)
Life the game... (Score:3, Funny)
I guess some geeks discovered how to make babies.
Hey, sounds like some Uwe Boll would do (Score:3, Funny)
Input (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, the real constraint was the network lag. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Input (Score:2, Informative)
No, not really. The biggest constraint is development time and carrier/publisher politics. The biggest technical problems are phone bugs, memory limitations, and J2ME.
While the input is a bit restrictive, it only takes a little creativity to use it well. (and of course willingness to change the game to fit the input methods available)
What phones need is some kind of tilt sensitivity (for example), which would be easy to ma
Re:Input (Score:1)
You find arcade games from the 70's that take less ressources, pixels and colors than available on all phones that are way more fun, but nobody seems to be motivated into making good phone games and exploiting the phones capacities to the fullest.
Re:Input (Score:1)
Throw centipede, joust, donkey kong, tetris, pacman, defender, qix, or other popular old games with real playability on a phone and people will want them. And you don't even need to do research or take a chance with retro games.
But people aren't going to pay a website. Only the Britney Spears crowd will pay to download a ringtone or game. But if it comes on the phonebill
Tilt sensitivity (Score:2)
The main problem I've found with using the buttons is their latency can be too high for games where reaction speed is an issue, and the way they're wired can often mean while holding down one key, certain other keys presses will no longer
Re:Input (Score:1)
A whirlwind link to the actual article (Score:5, Informative)
The original link is to the images and captions. Here's a link to the actual article.
http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/mar20 06/id20060317_074043.htm [businessweek.com]
Seems familiar. (Score:2)
Random verbs and nouns (Score:3, Funny)
Sounds like just another day with Marketing to me.
tabletoppers do it too (Score:2)
Then there's Game Chef [game-chef.com], who just wrapped up their 2006 contest. This has the luxury of a full week to make a tabletop RPG from a given list of ingredients and mystery requirement. This is competitive, the best eight
The problem with doing this on mobiles (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem with making games for mobile phones and then distributing them publicly is thus:
Business meets scratchware? (Score:1)