2008 PlayBasic (game making) Competition Theme

[ATLUS]

yea Double Dragon type game its cool!!!!!

[kevin]

Personally, I think  Double Dragon styled games require a lot more media then static fighters such as   International Karate/ Exploding Fist/ through to Street Fighter/Mortal Kombat.   While there are sprite sheets posted around the web,  Compo Submissions won't be allowed to contain any media that they don't own.  So using the DD  a SF/Sf2 etc sprites sheets is out of the question.

[Draco9898]

heres some terms along with example games if your confused-
Beat em' up- Double Dragon, Final Fight, Sega's Golden Axe
   You go around a level from a side scrolling view with a bit of depth allowing you to move up and down about 50% of the screen as well as the normal left to right. However, the player is usually forced in one direction and forced to fight in segments of the level until all the enemies are defeated then urged to move to the next level segment. You collect weapons or objects around a level such as a crow bar or a pipe and can use them, usually only with a certain amount of hits with it. The enemies have health bars and need alot of comboing to get killed. Usually the enemies will try to group up on you, so having a tactic for dealing with stray enemies of essential.

Shoot Em' up- Gradius, R-TYPE

Fighter/Fighting game- (also known as beat 'em ups, particularly in the UK)
StreetFighter, Wakuwaku7, King of Fighters, Marvel vs capcom. I have always just called them fighting games myself.



As for media needs of a fighter versus a beat em' up,  It's a toss up. Fighters need lots of frames of animation in some what high rez to look good, and you'll probably want a decent background bigger than the screen as well.
Beat em' ups would require less frames of animation because there will not be as many moves available as most of these games. The game probably won't mind if you just mash A for a default string combo most of the time. Yet, you'll also need enemies, and tiled backgrounds as well

[Zenn]

What about a time restricted RPG adventure. For example instaed of the usual save the world in seven days thing: Why not save the world in a matter of sixty minutes. RPG60M.

[kevin]

    I'm not too keen on RPG compo themes.    For a compo to work from our perspective,  it must produce completed entries, otherwise it's largely pointless.     So conceptually that means dumbing everything down into lowest common denominator.   However, when we've picked fairly simple genres in the past, the success rate hasn't been fantastic.  While I'm sure there's lot of people who are interested in the RPG genre, I just can't imagine it working in a open compo.    Given we're talking about mostly inexperienced programmers here, working to a strict time line and media limitations.

    So far, we'll probably try and pick a basic genre (platformer is looking good)  and let users choose between themes like we did last year. 

[ATLUS]

wanted see cool game for playbasic! can sport game or isometric raceing game as rock and roll raceing or arcade as sonic?!?

[Draco9898]

If we're going to do racing, it might as well be 3d with a flat plane like the racing example thats lying around somewhere here.
I'm still really eager to make a fighting game, hehe.

Kevin, perhaps you can help me with my framerate problem inside the general threads? I'd appreciate it.

[Zenn]

How about games based on those old Fighting Fantasy books,easy to code even for a noob (like myself) and minimal media is required, and if your worried about time scale, restrtict the whole adventure to one dugion/tower ect, to keep it fast paced.

[philltec]

This might be a bit pathetic but what about games based on movies?

[kevin]

     Movies gives a lot of conceptually leeway,  but down side is we'd be stepping on somebody else's IP.

[ATLUS]

hey boys mb beat'em up game no need more media if use tile animation
need faces all chars and one animation body for all chars
see plz:

[Zenn]

Why not remake a retro flop (E.T anyone), and recreate it to a five star package.

[SpellSword]

How about a Scrolling Platformer?

Example:
The game must have scrolling environment like Super Mario Bros; not a static environment like Bubble Bobble.

[kevin]

That's the most likely candidate at this point.   

[Tifu]

That's good, there's lots of variety you can have with platformers so you shouldn't get X entries all with mostly the same gameplay :)