Game Reviews 42 RPGs 55 Arcade 34 Puzzle 18 Platform 10 Strategy Sections QB News Site Archives Game Guides Our Projects Entertainment Awards QB Links Interact QB Chatroom Mailing List Submissions Link to Us Job Openings (7/24/2002) V Planet is setting up it's own QB coding competition to salute one of QB's most sacred treasures: the QB minigame! Read on to find out how to join.
Ever since Microsoft Nibbles was released with the QBasic package, minigames have been a common part of QB, thanks to QB's ease of programming and it's 64K file size limit. To commemorate the presence of these Minigames and the QB programmers who helped bring these lovable games into fruitition, V Planet is introducing a big surprise for the 2002 QB Gaming Gold Awards: a Minigame coding competition! This year's awards will have a new category called the "Best Competition Entry". This new Gaming Gold Award will be given to the winner of the Minigame Coding Competiton, and everyone who is free to code for twenty hours between Sunday, August 4th to Sunday, August 11th is invited to enter. Here's how the Minigame compo works: Essentially, on Sunday, August the 4th, V Planet will update it's website with a choice of three types of games. Everyone who's signed up to take part can choose which of the three games they want to make, and they can spend NO MORE than 20 hours working on it during the next week. At the end, the winner will be showered with praise and applause and recieve an award for best competition entry in this year's Gaming Gold Awards. :) To ensure that nobody gets a unfair advantage over anybody else by starting early, we are not going to give any details over the actual content of the games until the last minute, but programmers of any ability who know how to make games will have enough knoweldge to partake. And remember, you will have a choice of THREE games of which to code anyway, so you're bound to see at least one choice which suits your preference. I can tell you, however, that it won't be an RPG. The rules are fairly loose, but here are the essentials: (1) Time Limit: The game has to be coded in only twenty hours or less within the first full week of August. (2) Use of Libaries: The code of the game will not be taken into consideration (i.e. only the compiled version of the game will be considered). This also means that any ASM lib you want to use is fine. Even as a tie-breaker, we won't give an prefential treatment to people who've coded thier own libraries or worked in pure QB over someone who chooses to work in DirectQB or something similar. (3) Game Content: The game's content must be one of the options choosen by you on the site update at Sunday, the 4th of August this year. (4) Judging: All games will be judged by V Planet Staff - for this reason they cannot enter. The staff's decision is final. The winner will be annouced at this year's Gaming Gold Awards. All contest entries will be given a full mini-review by the staff, so you'll get to hear exactly what we think of it :) (5) File Size Limits: The game can be any file size you wish, but try not to go overboard. Aim low, because it's essential that you manage to finish the game within the twenty hours given, and it's unlikely that any programmer will be able to make anything larger than a minigame with the twenty-hour coding limit. Therefore it's important to plan very well. (6) Cheating: There's very little we can do about cheating. If you spend 160 hours in the week and don't bother to eat and sleep in order to produce the best contest entry, we probably won't know that you did. However, this contest is just a bit of fun, and anyway, how happy would you be to win knowing that you didn't play by the rules? (7) Time Exceeding: If 19 hours are gone and you're only half way through, just send the incomplete game, and if it's any good, you could still win. (8) Originality Clause: You can use graphics and music from your other projects if you wish, but they must be your own. To encourage originality, time invested in making your own graphics and music outside of coding your game will not count towards your coding time. So if you're interested, make it known! You can say so on our forum, or you can e-mail any of the V Planet staff. All that's really required is that you're free to code for the first full week in August. And finally, the main purpose of hosting this compitition isn't to set members of the QB Community against each other, but rather to flood QB with a new collection of exciting new minigames. Everyone is welcome to take part, regardless of ability. Article written by V Planet Staff |
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