Some rough info and ideas about BGMC 24šŸ‘

Game Engine Game Engine Support and Discussion
1

Hey everyone.

Last Bgmc was a blast and I think one of the biggest yet.
But donā€™t worry BGMC 24 is not around the corner yet. The earliest I will have time to organize it will be late March. So look out for it then.

My main goal for this BGMC will be to get more finished games. Thatā€™s why Iā€™m thinking of some restricting topics that will take away time consuming tasks like animating. Tell me if you think this is a good or bad idea.

Also this time, there will be no bug fixing time. Bug fixes belong to game development, and it is good practice to fix bugs as soon as they appear. I will try to be available to help out if there are strange bugs.

Another change Iā€™d like to make is the following:
Instead of 7 days before submitting the game in the finished games forum, you will have to submit after 3 days. Your basic game has to be finished by then, and the last 4 days can be spent on adding features and fixing problems.
My idea is that this will help with keeping the scope small and getting feedback during development to create a better game overall.

As for voting, I think judges were fine, but I might have an additional community vote to contrast the judges. Community votes will be ditched if they are fraudulent.

Thanks for reading. Please give me some feedback, so I can make BGMC 24 a great experience for everyone.

2

I do not really enjoyed the idea that judging depends on just a few people especially as the scores are subjective (and the problems I had last time). I do no enjoy the idea of opening the door for cheating by letting anybody vote either.

Judges ā€¦ fine. Should be trusted and accepted members of the community. They should not join with own contributions.

How about earning the right to vote?

Contributors vote
When you contribute to the contest you are allowed to judge the others.

  • To avoid ā€œI vote everyone low that the points I get are worth moreā€ the final points could be scaled (the best score becomes 100% the lowest score becomes 0%).
  • Teams get one vote (either they have to vote together as one, or the votes get weighted e.g. a team of 2 - each team member gets 1/2 vote.).
  • Voting starts after closing the contest -> there should be no conflict with time.
  • It is optional, but I canā€™t estimate the influence of missing votes.

Former contributors vote
How about let previous BGMC contributors vote?

  • If they want to vote they should not joining the current one
  • They proofed to be serious about the contest.
  • This can be an own voters category or they are part of the jury votes.

This way there should be much more votes than before, which is providing a better picture. All voters are known beforehand. The options to cheat on votes should be limited.

3

Bring the bug fix day back. It was really needed. Although I do see the day being nullified when after 3 days you post your finished work and people give you feedback on bugs then. The problem with the three day thing is that some people who are making a game but not paying close attention to the competition will forget all the rules and everything, especially new people.

4

I think 7 days is best. Most people canā€™t actually devote a full 7 days to game development, but they can find some time during those 7 days. I can often find 1 or 2 hours a day to put towards a total of around 14 hours development time during a 7 day period. Other people might be able to dedicate two big chunks of a weekend to make a similar amount of game dev time, but not have any time during the week.

Some people here live in different time zones, which also makes it difficult to fit in game dev time (if the first day starts when Iā€™m sleeping I might miss half a weekend).

Having short game dev periods with regular meetings to decide the next phase of development is a common method of game development, and it can work really well to help teams make games very quickly. But it only works when your team is dedicated and working on a project full time. In this case Iā€™m worried that if after 3 days no one has anything worth while they might just give up, where as in the past there were quite a few people who wasted time at the beginning but caught up at the end of the week.

Personally I use this method when developing, usually I have fully functional gameplay by the end of the second day and spend the rest of the time on content and assets.

Hereā€™s an example: day 1, day 2, (I didnā€™t record the other days since some of them were lost days- no development that day- and the others were simply spend on boring asset creation), finished.

It would work well for me, but maybe not for others, which I why Iā€™m not that much in favor of it.

For votingā€¦ in the past I created a spread sheet and had all competitors vote for the other games. They had 50 points to devote to scoring and they had to spend them all, with a maximum of 10 points per game, and they couldnā€™t vote for themselves. I added their votes to the spreadsheet and tallied the totals. Some people were upset they couldnā€™t vote, having not submitted a game, but that could be solved by letting ex-competitors join. Combining this with a google docs type thing might work, but I found having someone managing it all kept confusion and protests to a minimum. It also meant I didnā€™t have to tell everyone who came last, saving them the embarrassment. I know at least one person who came last in a BGMC and hasnā€™t been back to the forum since, which is sad.

5

Thanks for the feedback.

When I said, post a game in the finished games forum after 3 days and then iterate in that, I meant it as a guideline. It wonā€™t be necessary to submit after 3 days, the development time is still 7 days. But it is meant to reduce the scope of the games even further. If you submit after 7 days, this doesnā€™t affect judgement, but maybe it affects your game. So if people think of it as a 3 day game jam, Iā€™m hoping that there will be smaller, more completed games that way.

Voting will be difficult to handle as always. I will try to find a method that works.
As far as prices go, Iā€™d love to have something again, cause money helps to motivate people. I was also thinking about giving the person in last place a private skype session, teaching them about bge and game design. Do you think thatā€™s a good idea?

6

I think that is an amazing idea. People that come in last place wonā€™t feel like they are the worst because they can get some tips from the pros. I also donā€™t think that bgmc should be a 3 day competition because sdfgeoff created the weekly nano game competition (wng) itā€™s a 4 hour game competition which seems like a better idea for a mini competition. And I personally think that someone (maybe I) could start another one again sometime cause they are cool.

My WNG1 game: made in 4.5 hours

7

Encouraging entrants to have the scope of the games done in three days, with time to clean things up/ improve the rest of the week sounds great. I didnā€™t really like the extra bug fixing day. I rushed to troubleshoot small things and actually caused more issues in my game that day as a result

The problem with having the community vote is that some people might not play every game. And if entrants are allowed to vote, there could be some bias. Having the community vote equal to a judge sounds good to me, but there would need to be some sophistication to itā€¦ like each game must have a minimum number of votes in the community vote.

8

Community votes are a very bad idea once prizes and money becomes involved.
Problems:

  • vote manipulation, people voting for their own game with different accounts.
  • all entrants voting high for their game and low for everyone else.
  • the community here are mainly game devs, not ACTUAL gamers. Game devs will have bias towards features rather than gameplay.
    for example: No manā€™s sky was a procedurally generated universe, most game devs loved it, but the judges noticed the lack of gameplay like a normal gamer would and therefore its score suffered.

Community votes are cool, when the community is small, but after last BGMC I cannot recommend more that you do NOT use community votes if there are monetary prizes involved.

@CGsky have you been getting my emails to sort out prizes?

9

Like what Monster was saying, only certain people could be allowed to vote, and that might help with that problem. My concern was that the more people voting, the longer it will take for everyone to play all of the games and cast their votes.

On the other hand, maybe there could be a community vote that is not counted toward the actual results. The judgeā€™s votes would be final, but the community vote could still be there with its own ā€œnonmonetaryā€ reward or recognition.

10

Only allowing ā€œcertainā€ people to vote is the same as having judges though :slight_smile:
I guess you could have a ā€œpeopleā€™s voteā€ winner.

11

I was also thinking about giving the person in last place a private skype session, teaching them about bge and game design.

I donā€™t like this idea. I think itā€™s just better to provide all games with written feedback like how the judges did in BGMC23.

People donā€™t learn how to make good games with a private skype session, they learn how to make good games by making games. My first few games were trash, my more recent games (during game jams) have been better, imo. As always, practice makes better. Iā€™ve learned how to make my games better by having others play them and receiving feedback, not by taking a class in game dev.

The rest:
I like the idea of taking away bug fixing time.
I like the idea of having really restricting themes because I think that encourages creativity and smaller scope.

Community vote:
I think a community vote should be implemented in some way, I just donā€™t know how to do it so that itā€™s fair. Hereā€™s one idea:

  • Have a ticketing system. If people want to vote, they need to get a ticket.
  • Every ticket has a code that is assigned to a member of the community forum, you can do this through google forms. A person puts in their BA username in a google form, and the contest organizer PMs the user on BA a ticket code.
  • When a BA user votes on a google form, they need to type in the ticket code somewhere so that it counts as a valid vote.

Since every user is assigned a unique ticket code, you know exactly who is voting through the google form and if they belong to BA. Moreover, for participants of BGMC24, you can ignore self-votes. That, or, participants canā€™t vote.

The biggest issue with this type of ticking system is that since BA doesnā€™t have bots, the organizer needs to do all the manual work.

12

There will be written feedback for everyone. The skype call is just an option, to teach some basics, which you can also learn yourself by doing, but it will be more condensed. Iā€™m planning to make some general game design tutorials soon, so I hope that will help.

My main intention is to support bge beginners more with the next bgmc. Restrictions will hopefully help new game makers create smaller games, which are more complete.
Iā€™m not trying to handycap veterans, just thinking of ways to help the beginners.
BGMCs are the greatest opportunity to get new people in the forums and this will benefit us all.

did anyone hear of game jam hosting on gamejolt by the way? I might check it out and maybe host it there, or parallel to here.

13

Most people who enter a competition hope to win, but they all expect to place in the top 50% of entries, thatā€™s just human nature. We all rank ourselves as better than average no matter our true skill level.
Even if they didnā€™t put in much effort they will still be upset about coming last. Often they could have done better just by making a couple of small improvements. I think feedback is good. I think full public ranking and public feedback is not so good. If you publish the top three results and send personal feedback, then everyone can tell themselves they probably came 4th. :slight_smile:

14

I learned alot, my issue was the timeline was tighter than one person could do, and AkiraSan fell ill on day one, and I did not really revise my timetable, even though I aquired a few more hats =)

That said, I was able to come close to what I set out to achieve,
(tell a story by looking around for clues)

However I did not have any time to make the actual story :3

15

As a judge Iā€™ve always tried to judge the entries from the project time and game idea perspective. Thatā€™s why I gave higher points to most participants. I think judging the visuals are not very good idea if participants are free to use high quality assets from internet.
Maybe we should judge the overall game design idea, gameplay execution and sounds and visuals but as how they fit in the game idea not as quality.
Actually it will be better if there is not an option for free assets from internet. Maybe you should expand the time but require custom assets and sounds. Just like in the game jams.
Right now there is some kind of misjudging, because if ā€œThe long way homeā€ game assets are not custom made it would be not fair to give the game such a high scores. If ā€œCity of Timeā€ or ā€œKnights of Suzanneā€ were made with the visual quality of ā€œThe long way homeā€, or if ā€œThe holeā€ visuals are completely made by Smoking_mirror, I wouldnā€™t be so sure who would win.

My point isā€¦we should come up with an idea how to put all games on a flat start, so judges(whoever they are next time) and forum members would know, that what they play/see/hear is actually what the participants are really capable of doing.

16

My wrectified animators kit is working and pretty damn easy to understand and use nowā€¦

17

Haidme is right. Asset creation isa big part in game development and I think everyone should learn to make their own.
To avoid games which only consist of assets, I could try to give some guidelines for the developing time.
E.g.:
-1 day max of idea finding
-1 day of asset creation
-3 days gameplay programming
-2 days bugfixing and feature adding

donā€™t get me wrong, you wonā€™t have to follow these, but they may help beginners to keep the scope low.
Also while Iā€™d say, blendswap models shouldnā€™t be allowed, i think textures and sounds from the web are totally fine.
As you might see, Iā€™m willing to change some things with bge to hopefully tackle some of the issues from the last times.

18

Hy everyone.

I try to play the interesting BGMC23 products on very low config.
10" screen , no mouse, protable version of blender, azerty, no numpad ā€¦

this give some advantages and (lot of) inconvenients

advantages : If i can play a game on this low (bad) config this game can probably
run on every (normal) config.

inconvenients : if the is 100 potential problems iā€™ll have 99 of them.

when i try to run BMG23 products i found some problems (and make suggest for BGMC24)

  1. : what file to run ? => name no explicit
    suggest : if the name of the game is name_of_game the should be
    named name_of_game.blend or main.blend or run_fist.blend
    or name_of_game.bat to run blender + the game + config + path + ā€¦

  2. : where is this file ? some games have complex directory with
    non explicit name
    where is THE directory to use (relative path problems)
    suggest : the main file to start should be at the first level of directories.

  3. : When the blend is loaded is there some config to adjust
    (all upbge game need glsl but this is not the defaut config
    I try N/Shading / ā€¦
    I try blenderartists fing : upbge glsl config 274 of non pertnent answer ā€¦)
    even the experimented Monster had the same problem ā€¦
    (i still not found where is this glsl config option on upbge)
    suggest : if some config is necessary
    a todo.txt or readme_first.txt with instruction
    or automatic run_first.bat or other config script
    if a version of upbge is packed why donā€™t put the good defaut config ?

4)when the game is started : what to do ? how to do this ?
On the (very nice) story of CG Sky on my 10" screen i saw one white pixel at the center
of the sceen (at the beginning i thougt : ā€œstrange this persistant bug !ā€)
on white backgroud (sky ā€¦) this pixel is invisible.

in The Hole (it run very well on my low config 45 fps) I had to read the
game_input.py file to found the ā€˜cā€™ key function

suggest :
include help option (F1 H ā€¦)
or manual.txt file
or while playing, print some suggestions

Thanks everyone for your great job (and spent time) JoLo

19

Hi Jolo, I wrote some instructions in the finished games thread for ā€œThe Holeā€, but yes, I forgot to include that one in the game. Since many people got the game from the all games pack they wouldnā€™t have seen the instructions on the finished games thread. Itā€™s not easy to remember everything when making a game in 7 days, and itā€™s important to get some feedback from players who might see something youā€™ve missed (why Iā€™m a big fan of the extra day of bug-fixing/ issue handling). I included a READ_ME file in the updated version of the game I released after the competition finished.
I always make the start file the ā€œmain_gameā€ blend file at the root directory, thatā€™s just good practice. Another name might be ā€œstartā€ or something like that.

@ CG Sky

How would you feel about doing a BGMC with predefined assets?
They might be some simple rigged low poly characters, weapons and a couple of vehicles and tilesets. Maybe some buildings, inside and out or an outdoors type tileset. Some trees, rocks, bushes and animals. Probably some pickups like health kits, ammo, papers, keys etcā€¦

People would be free to modify the assets, but shouldnā€™t add to them too much. Maybe allow an extra folder with external assets not to exceed a certain size. So they could add an extra character, or a monster or some extra pickups or something.
There could be a folder of sounds, some free to use music etcā€¦

There could be a couple of 2d shaders in the pack for people to use however they felt worked well for them.

The theme would be tied to the style/feel of the assets.
It would be interesting to see what different people would make from the starting assets, how they might use them in creative ways, and how many different types of games might come out of it. It wouldnā€™t be the first time BGMC has been run with a more restrictive set of rules. In the past there was one where you had to design everything to be compatible with the N64 games system, including texture size limitations and file size limits.

I for one would be interested in focusing more on gameplay and fun rather than spending a lot of time developing assets. It would also be awesome to see how people compete when they are on a level playing field in regard to assets. How would you make your game really stand out if youā€™re using the same material as everyone else?

An example theme might be world war 2, with some soldiers and tanks as assets, or end of the world with some zombies and mutants, or maybe crime with some police officers and gang members. People could take those assets and use them in interesting ways, like making a survival game, or a 2d platformer or on rails shooter or anything else they put their mind to.

Iā€™d be happy to donate some time to producing some assets for such a competition.

20

A predefined asset set sounds good, but if you completely force people to build all their own assets you will end up with games made out of cubes and sphereā€™s.