If you live in the Greater Denver/Boulder area, and are willing to brave the inclement weather (seriously - go home winter, you're drunk), we've got an awesome event for you!
Tonight starting at 6 p.m., our friends over at QuickLeft are kicking off Boulder Startup Week with the "Battle of the Games Hackfest." Competitors can make their own adventure text game, table-top game, or anything their heart desires - but it has to be done in under three hours!
Go on - hack it!
Don't code? Don't worry. QuickLeft will have all the classic games in the house for you to get your Donkey Kong, Contra, and Battletoads fix. There will also be beer, food and prizes! SparkFun is sponsoring the event, so the first 20 teams who use the MaKey MaKeys with their application will go home with a free one.
Register now! We hope to see you there!
For those interested, Paul Talbot of 23rd Studios took a handful of photos of the event. Check them out on his flickr album.
So... who won the "Make a game in 3 hours" competition? And how do we play it?
Here is a link to Escape Boulder's game! It is pretty funny, so I recommend anyone to check in out. Also, here is a list that shows the top winners.
It was actually a text-based game called Escaping Boulder. Can't find the link currently, but I think QuickLeft may be posting the links later.
I guess the secret here is to make your game REALLY simple... Like this adventure game U'm calling "Gru's revenge!":
You are in a bar. There are people drinking, and some people seem to be engage in a timed programmnig contest. You see a Gru.
(Enter command)
The Gru eats you! Game over!
See... It's simple because it doesn't matter what you type is as a command! The Gru ALWAYS eats you. I could code that in 3 hours.
Here, I wrote you an implementation, slightly adjusted for canonicity. (Grues generally aren't visible, right?)
Brilliant! That's it right there.
If you really want to make it look like you actually put some effort into it... have your adventurer wander between several different areas in the bar complete with accurate descriptions... it's like you were actually there! before being randomly eaten by the grue.
At this point, I'd probably need to decide between TADS and Inform 7. Or maybe it should be multi-player. This looks sort of interesting...
Perhaps I'll decamp to a dingy, poorly-lit bar to think over the problem in more detail.
Well you better hurry...
Remember, you're not making a game, you're making a marketing demo. You have to be done by 8:30 tops so you can have the people around you play it and be laughing like drunk revelers (Hint... give it to drunk people to play.) That way your game will already be trending locally when the judges get there.