If I wanted to set up a contest, what would I have to do? I was thinking that it would be a good exercise to concentrate on creating a social environment in blender rather than just graphics. The environment would have social structure, interactions, and have the appearance that each character in it is a thinking being. The basis for the environment would be based on the book Flatland which you can view for free online.
Flatland is a 2-d environment with 2-d people. Different Shapes in flatland have different social status. I like the environment of Flatland because it wouldn’t use a great deal of graphics, it can be looked at for free online, it is a very short book, and it describes its 2-d world with great detail. (however, leaves some important things out like reproduction, eating, death which might have to be dealt with creatively)
Anyway, what should I do to set up a contest for this? What kind of time frame seems reasonable? Anyone here set up a contest before? I could offer a small cash prize or I could offer a handblown glass trophy for the winner.
so ur trying to make a contest where people should make a game where the player can interact with other characters and objects? that’s pretty tough for people who don’t know python, but if there was a cash prize then this wouldn’t be a bad idea… Except when there would be only 2 contestants…
It doesn’t sound like too many people are interested. I could still do a contest even if there weren’t too many interested…I just wanted to see what kinds of things people would come up with…anyone ever set up a contest. If I offered one, I would want to do it in legit way…or if there is only one person interested I could just award or pay that one who is interested to test the waters on this idea. I don’t think this exercise would have to involve a ‘player.’ Perhaps simply a walkthrough type interaction would be sufficient. I would just like to see more complex social structures developed in Blender and wanted to see what people could come up with. I thought Flatland would be a good source to develop those social structures because the graphics on it would be so simple. What I would hope to see would be the characters reacting to each other as described in the book. In Flatland females are almost like lines so they must be careful not to approach anyone from straight on because others can barely see them coming and they will impale them. The male characters come in all sorts of shapes. There are several kinds of triangles. There are squares, polygons, and circles ( really the circles are characters that are really close to looking like circles but actually just have many sides. I was thinking that this project could be more like a scientist (being the ‘player’) looking through a microscope at the social structure of the people in Flatland. Sort of like a SIMS game except that you really don’t interact with the characters. And if there were provisions made so that they would die and reproduce then you could almost just let the program go and see what happens. This may seem totally boring to many of you. But it could lead to some interesting results that would help propogate new ideas others could use in their games.
or maybe a competition of games of a certain genre… or to copy some old video games… like super mario, zelda, final fantasy and make it in 3d not in some vector graphics…
those were only examples… there are some games left… like excitebike, duck hunt, bomberman, balloon battle… or you could just do a cartoon game of teenage mutant ninja turtles, scooby doo, dragon ball z and so on…
Would anyone be interested in just developing the the above idea with me? I could pay a small fee. My only stipulation is that it would then have to be available to everyone and for anyone to use. I just think it would be a worthwhile endeavor.
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