Welcome back!
Time has passed but game jams did not really get much attention, so let me throw in a new idea, maybe you like it.
Instead of a traditional game jam with a topic and some time to be creative with
a new game, what do you think about the following:
There will be a specific "reference game", either a classic (like Pong/Snake/Tetris/etc... ) or something the community created (may it be for this purpose or because it already fits the needs). The goal would be trying to recreate the reference game as close as possible. (Clone Wars, Total Ripoff, you name it
)
For this to work and to be interesting I suggest that all the needed assets (spritesheets, sounds, music, fonts) as well as some form of executable (or at least a detailed description or enough video footage/screenshots) should be provided, so that there is nothing unclear what has to be done, because I don't think anyone here wants to spend any time on gathering the assets instead of implementing the actual game.
I find myself very uncreative when it comes to having ideas to some specific topic and spend most of the time searching for ideas, which I would rather spend implementing. The creativity part then comes in
how I implement the game.
The
main rating would then be: How good does this compare to the reference game? (to a certain degree, for example only level ABC of game XYZ, everything else would not influence the rating)
Depending on the game there could be additional / other criteria as well, like how extensive is the clone? how smooth does it run? is it easily expandable? did you also manage to recreate the difficult part in level ABC? Not the best ideas I know, but you get the point...
It would be nice if you could then test the clones without knowing who made them and give it a score how good you think it compares to the original.
Some of you might think this is boring / a waste of time / not a challenge / ruins the fun of creating your own games / etc... and I can totally understand that, but maybe I am not the only one who finds this interesting and has some ideas?
This is just one of many variants. Another would be to also provide
some assets and maybe an
incomplete description as a starting point and then you go from there. This makes it more creative / open again, depending on the scenario.
I see this more as a mix between a jam (or simply a challenge) and learning new things, because for certain parts of a game you might have to learn completely new stuff, which is part of the joy in my opinion.
This might also be a useful resource to put on the wiki, so people can see how the same thing was made using (maybe completely) different methods by different people and learn from them.
What do you think about all that?
Thanks for stopping by!
