Some rough info and ideas about BGMC 24šŸ‘

Game Engine Game Engine Support and Discussion
21

I think that is not a bad szenario. All of my first games where made from cubes and spheres. I didnĀ“t even use textures until I was learning to make games for over 2 years. And ā€œthe long way homeā€ proves, that assets can be really simple, if they just have a coherent style.

Still I think, having an asset pack is a good idea. Might be a great resource in general. So I guess IĀ“ll start a list with things to put in there. Feel free to contribute all kinds of helpful stuff. Might even put in addons and small scripts.

22

I like the predefined asset idea, but they should be completely unrelated things like in a still life. This could spark creativity while still leveling the playing field. Unless it is the theme, of course, then they should be related. We should also keep in mind that the restrictions should really be as simple as possible. When new people think about joining the contest, they might shy away or be overwhelmed by a long list of to-dos and not-to-dos.

Edit: Of course itā€™s up to CG. Iā€™m not trying to impose anything :slight_smile:

23

I like the idea of a kind of still life. Or a museum exhibit come to life. Or just an every day street scene.

When I was looking through the assets for ā€œnukeā€ in the last competition I though ā€œWow, I could make a great game with this stuff!ā€

The danger is that you might get carried away and try to make the game too complex, especially if the assets are too realitic in style.

24

What if the assets were more generic in nature?
Think about the TV show ā€œthe Simpsonsā€ if you had some assets from the show thereā€™s hundreds of different types of games you could make.
I donā€™t think it would be a good idea to use a preexisting franchise though.
What about a cartoonish world called Blendertown?
Iā€™m going to think about that idea today, do some sketches and make some models tonightā€¦ would anyone enjoy making a game in such a setting?

25

Hm I think having the assets define the setting is really limiting. Iā€™d rather have a bunch of typical game assets that have many applications. For sure they should be in a coherent artstyle. The thing is that textures might not be optimized if we just collect a bunch of assets.
I think preset assets could be cool for a BGMC theme, Iā€™ll see if it goes well with the ideas I have in mind.

26

@Smoking_mirror, I definitely would! Youā€™re not talking about for the BGMC, right? I was just playing the game Jet Set Radio on Steam (first time Iā€™ve played a game outside of blender in probably 6 months) and it made me really want to work a game in a similar style. I was going to start making some buildings and an environment tomorrow. The game is almost 20 years old now (check it out if you havenā€™t played it), but the cartoonish style and animations they used are timeless. As are the Simpsons. A game in a similar style with normal maps in the right places and some modern mechanics, rigid bodies, etc. could be exceptional! I also noticed they used the trick where you duplicate a mesh and flip the normals to give characters and objects outlines. I always thought that was a new technique.

27

I think:
Judges to determine the ā€œofficialā€ winner
Separate ā€œcommunity choiceā€ vote for fun / bragging rights

Surely at some point thereā€™s gonna be a drama queen whoā€™s salty about winning the community vote but not the judging. Weā€™ll just have to ignore that guy.

28

Yes, maybe just a bunch of generic stuff would be a good idea.

29

While (in my eyes) it is indeed to let Blender act as authoring tool in future, this is a complete different type of competition.

The goal of BGMCā€™s was (and Iā€™m sure it still is) to show that it is possible to create a finished game with the existing tools. This includes asset creation as well as defining the over all design, describing behavior as well as publishing, testing and (limited) maintenance.

Most game ideas stuck with exactly that ā€¦ with an idea and maybe a few assets. The BGMC shows the ability to create games even in a short time scale. This increases the number of finished game and is a great source of ā€œhow to do thatā€.

We had other contests as well (see the ā€œadd-a-thingā€ contests). I think they should run independent from BGMC. The assets can still be used within BGMC as long as they fit the contest rules.

30

Yeah i agree to monster above. I think bge should be about every aspect of game development. A predefined asset library someone else might want to try out for the next bgmc.
My goal for this one, is just to get more finished games even from beginners.
The main thing they need to learn, is to cut down their scope. This will also help with future game projects.

Also anyone interested in a ā€œdesign a board/card game challengeā€? I wanna do that someday too.

31

Over at playcanvas, they run game compotetions where they give you one or two assets which you HAD to use in some way. Some were rigged/animated/scripted, and others were just models. This would be a lot less effort than doing an asset pack, but it does mean that all of the games are generally very similar (particularly if one of the assets had logic associated with it).

Iā€™ll throw in my $0.02
The hardest part of a BGMC is ā€¦ planning and time management. If you spend the first day developing a solid plan for the rest of the week (develop a schedule, figure out how much time you have available, figure out the structure of your game etc.) then the development is generally a lot easier, and you will often figure out how much you have to cut the scope early on, rather than trying to cut the scope half-way through. For example, in my BGMC entry ā€˜Crystal Minersā€™ there was something like 10-15 hours of discussion with a friend (in other words, planning) that went into that game between when the contest theme was announced and when the contest actually started. This meant that when the contest started, I knew exactly what we were making, and approximately how long I could budget for each task. It also meant that we threw out the idea of lava pits, human units and a whole host of other things, because we realised just how big the original idea was. As a result, there was very little wasted time on features that never made it into the game.

While I cannot see a way to get people to do it for BGMCā€™s, planning is a developers most powerful asset for time-limited (ie all) game development.

My suggested timeline for development in a BGMC:
Day 1) Planning and prototyping. Then throw out the prototypes.
Day 2) Game play basics - 90% of the gameplay functionality should be done by the end of this day.
Day 3) Game play finishing - 99% of the gameplay should be done by the end of this day.
Day 4) Asset making. All assets should be made by the end of this day
Day 5 - 7) Feedback, tweaking and testing.
Generally day3 and day4 get mixed and matched, a couple of assets on day 3, a little code on day 4.

Proof this works:
Cave Fly - won BGMC18, 90% done in the first two days
Crystal Minors - won BGMC21, 90% done in first three days
The BGMC entries I did that didnā€™t follow this (or a similar) timeline didnā€™t get more than a couple of votes. (The exception is Skypilot from BGMC7 (came second) when BGMC was a weekend contest, which obviously didnā€™t use this timeline).

Also anyone interested in a ā€œdesign a board/card game challengeā€? I wanna do that someday too.

Iā€™m keen! A friend and I are making a physical board game that I should computer-ify, and then thereā€™s also geodesic chess that I am currently working on in BGEā€¦

32

Oh my goodness. My total development time is usually less than 24 hours over 7 days. If I spent half that time discussing and planning the game thereā€™d be no time left to make it. :stuck_out_tongue:

For BGMC 23 I spent around 2 hours drawing a map and sorting through about 100 photos of abandoned spaces. That was almost the entirety of my planning.

I think everyone has a different method of development, some people spend a lot of time planning and a short intense burst of development. Other people have a plan just pop fully formed in to their head and spend more time working through the development as they expand the idea. I assume there are some people who havenā€™t developed a method yet, since they are making games for the first time. Those are the ones most likely to run out of time or submit a half finished game.

I like the idea of splitting development in two, a production, test and review stage, like we have at the moment with the bug fixing time, since it helps to eliminate the problem of unfinished or untested games. Itā€™s not a bad idea to include that extra time within the 7 days, but youā€™re going to get less well expanded games as a result.

The very worst scenario is that people spend time making a game and it canā€™t be judged because it doesnā€™t work and they donā€™t have time to fix it before the contest ends. I really value the time and effort people put in to the BGMC so it makes me sad to see that happen.

I guess I agree with Monster that asset creation is an important part of the BGMC. I do enjoy that part, but I find myself with less and less time to devote to it.

33

3 days are not much. I think it should be more. Game developers should have more time to show there potencial, in only 3 days we only gonna get very poor game design. Why to rush thing up if we can make ā€œthisā€ ā€œBGMCā€ more seriously. To actually start to see some good developments. BGE existes for some while and I never seen any ā€œbigā€ game completely made with blender. Why not to call every blender game artist possible and put together a ā€œrealā€ team. To push our self more. To create some kind of a new icon in blender. Yo Frankie is from 2009, we are in 2017 with a much more refined engine, waiting for 2.8 version (even better) and we are still making small contestes. We should regroup, talk about some changes, and make big changes. Not only to speak about the newest members of this community, and how amazing this community is, but yes to start talking about business, real business.
About game developement of course.
Now how we are going to do that? Well I donĀ“t know, thereĀ“s why it exists this community.

34

Just throwing in my 2 cents as well.

One of the things I always loved about making maps for Half-Life 2 was the huge asset library. If you wanted to make anything from a school to an abandoned town to a high tech lab to a massive desert, you could find all of the needed assets in the Half life 2 assets. It incorporated such a huge variety of settings and had so many models that you could pretty much make whatever you wanted. What if a volunteer compiled a library of pre-made models, textures, sounds, ect, and put them up on BA the day of the competition? The developers could just append the models/sounds/textures from this library into their .blend and save all (or most) of the time needed to make assets.

Also, can we submit ideas for the theme on this thread? I had the idea of a theme of making games more or less based around your daily life, where the player assumes the role of the developer and lives a day in their life. I played a flash game based on this concept once, but I donā€™t remember what it was called.

35

As said earlier this is a different kind of competition. If you like the idea you can just start such one. Be aware asset preparation is a huge task.

Within the BGMC you can already use predefined assets as long as they are public GPL and you refer to the sources.

There will be a new thread asking for topic suggestions before BGMC begins (I hope).

36

So whens It happening? Its late march now :stuck_out_tongue:

37

I think CG Sky is too busy to run the competition. itā€™s understandable, there have been times when i couldnā€™t possibly free up any time for running a game jam on my own.
If nothing happens after next week, I may go ahead and run it myself (with volunteers to help).
I donā€™t like the idea of a big gap between competitionsā€¦

38

Yeah Iā€™m sorry guysā€¦ As I told you before, thereā€™s quite a lot going on for me right now, which is why I havenā€™t gotten around to host BGMC 24 yetā€¦
I need to send out job applications and all that fun stuff. Hopefully Iā€™ll be done with that soon. Then I could host BGMC, if Smoking Mirror hasnā€™t done so until then.

39

Ok CGSky. I donā€™t want you to feel under pressure, itā€™s just for fun after all.
This week Iā€™ll start putting up some polls about a new BGMC date and Theme.
If anyone would like to help me with organizing it you can PM me any time.
If anyone else has a burning desire to host it themselves (as host you canā€™t really enterā€¦) then Iā€™d be happy to turn it over to them.

40

Ok feel free to start some polls to get this going. Here are some themes that I would have liked to use:
-one room. A game that takes place in one room to encourage focus on level design and environmental storytelling
-stationary. A game where the player doesnā€™t move physically.
Replay value. As the name suggests the goal is to create a short game with a high amount of replayability.

These themes would be a but unconventional, but I think restrictions will help beginners to create better games and focus on one aspect.