BGMC25 Advance Warning and Speculation Thread




This is the BGMC25 speculation thread, to let you know that it is upcoming. Post below with theme ideas, your preferred dates and so on. The contest is likely to be 2-3 weeks away minimum to give people a chance to see this thread and to comment.

Rules and Regs:

  • Premade assets are allowed, so long as they are freely available before the start of the contest.
  • The contest will be one week, plus one day at the beginning of planning time and one day at the end of bug fixing time. (9 days).
  • There will be an easter egg asset that must be included in your game.
  • File size must be less than 40Mb (zipped, not with executable)
  • Project should be able to be run by other people (ie run on normal PC’s, no crazy software dependencies, no specialised hardware)
  • Project must be provided with all sources (including .blend and script files) in a non-encrypted way (ie open source)
  • Game must be done in a BGE-integrated engine (ie BGE, UPBGE, blend4web, armoury)

Ideas for discussion

  • Should the contest theme line up with the monthly reddit blender contest theme? This way entries for the BGMC can be submitted for the blender contest a week or so after BGMC ends. (Nope)
  • Should I chase down some people to give feedback (judges)? (Probably)
  • Should the versions of blender be limited (eg to 2.78 and UPBGE 0.1.8) to avoid players needing to download lots of different versions? (Everyone below said yes. Hence, on the starting thread I will post links to the blender versions that should be used)

My answer for your last 3 question in order: No, No, No
If the contest is in 2 weeks I wont be able to participate so I would go for the 3 weeks ahead. My idea for the theme is: Teleport

My theme suggestion: Scale

Should the contest theme line up with the monthly reddit blender contest theme? This way entries for the BGMC can be submitted for the blender contest a week or so after BGMC ends.

I don’t mind either way.

Should I chase down some people to give feedback (judges)?

Again, if you have the time, patience and motivation, go ahead, I don’t mind either way :slight_smile:

Should the versions of blender be limited (eg to 2.78 and UPBGE 0.1.8) to avoid players needing to download lots of different versions?

Yes, unless everyone compiles for at least Mac/Windows on their version of Blender

I’m not down to download 5 versions of Blender. One is enough, two is a stretch (UPBGE and 2.78c).
If you do end up limiting versions of Blender, limit it to either 2.78c, UPBGE or both. In fact, for most people and for a week long project, there’s no real reason to use UPBGE - the scale of the game is not big enough to warrant the performance/feature advantage. However, I do recognize artists would want the performance/feature that comes with UPBGE, so I’d say limit it to both UPBGE and 2.78c.

The priority should be to make the games as easy as possible for people to play. In my opinion, everyone should include at least a .exe (as a separate download, file size doesn’t matter for this one).

Thanks sdfgeoff!

I agree with Lucrecious, no need for anything more than 2.78c and UPBGE. I doubt I have time to participate…but I would like to… :frowning:

theme: villainy(play the antagonist)

Some theme ideas I’ve been collecting:

  • The world below
  • The navigator
  • Prehistoric
  • Drones
  • Not Alone

I would love it if there would be judges not to judge which game should win (the community already does that if i remember correctly)

but instead the judges look at the winner’s blend file and tell him what he could do better (coding, logic bricks, i dont know something)

Some theme ideas:

Good vs evil

Low poly

Don’t get caught

For your last 3 ideas: no, yes, yes.

Nice set of rules and regulations.

You should track down the judges from BGMC23 if they’re free. (Haidme, Monster, Martinsh, and Contret). They gave a lot of good feedback from different angles.

My theme suggestion is Time (limit or Countdown). I also second Nick’s Good vs. Evil suggestion.

+1 for drones and time. I think another good theme is speed.

+1 for unified version (or at least all game must work and have been tested with 2.78c)

I think that would be a fun one, and something we haven’t seen before.
I’m ready for BGMC, anytime, any place. Except first week of August since I’ll be on holiday. :stuck_out_tongue:

My Theme suggestion is:
“n00b(s)”

the new guys, the inexperienced person, low level, something like that.

@Smoking mirror: that is not a bad idea…my interperetation is use only a bare set of functions or only logic…I’m sure this has been done before…when I was younger I did a competition in ‘C’ where we had to write a program using only 100 semicolons…they had to be real programs, not printf() or cout AKA ‘hello world’ stuff.

So it looks like we have unanimous support for limiting the versions of Blender. Both BGE and UPBGE will be allowed, but only a single version of each.
I’ll open up a theme vote in a few days with the themes people have suggested here, so keep them rolling in.

Just a question: Why the projects must be open source? I think will be a great idea to divide the jam like the ludum dare: Compo (with the source) and Jam (no source needed, just the executable). Cuz if the objective of the jam is to prove the capacibility of the BGE (and BGE derivates like UPBGE), or even help everyone to learn more, if you add the “no source needed” possibility will still be a great idea: Everybody that wants to share the knowledge will keep sharing, but the people that don’t want, instead of not participating, will have a chance to join to the jam and help showing the capacibility of the BGE.

Tks

It’s actually in the competetitors interest to make their game open source for this particular game jam.

Why? The number of voters is very small. In the Ludum Dare, hundreds if not thousands of people vote. So if one or two can’t play your game for technical reasons, then there is no real impact. In the BGMC there will be about 10-20 voters. If one of them can’t play your game for technical reasons, then you lose 5-10% of your possible score.
What technical reasons? Well, a disproportionate number of developers here run Linux (around on 30%). And for some funny reason, the only “closed” builds that we see coming from games are windows executables. So if you publish a windows executable instead of a blend file, you will probably lose 30% of your possible score, and will have nearly zero chance of winning.

Consider that you can still chose the open source license. It doesn’t have to be GPL (beyond the normal reasons why it has to be be). You can license your blend files and textures under any of the Creative Commons ones. Theres also nothing stopping you changing it straight after the contest. Indeed, some of the LD compo entries were made into full games - and used the entry as a “free demo” - so there is always that. Also note that Open Source does not equal free. You can have paid open source software - it just means that one you have legally acquired a copy of the software, you also have access to the source code.

You’re welcome to post a (GPL) executable, but before I put it in the all games pack, I will exercise my rights under the GPL to extract the source (aka blend), and put that in the all games pack instead. There’s a catch 22: either you publish a GPL executable, or you publish a non-GPL blend. Either way the blend is available for people to look at.

How would you do that? I didn’t know it was possible.

@Nicholas_A:
First by asking nicely, then by magic (yes it’s possible to extract a blend from an .exe)

sigh I wasn’t being rude.

I’m a bit confused by this one

@Nicholas_A:
I didn’t think you were?! Quite literally, the first step would be to ask them for the blend. Under GPL, they (supposedly) have to give it to me. I am hesitant to talk about how to extract blends from exe’s because, well, people like to think it can’t be done. If you dig around enough on BA you’ll find the solution.

@acloudyskye:
At the start of the contest, I will provide a 3D model. That 3D model should be hidden somewhere in your game. It is not technically required, but gives players something extra to look out for while playing.