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Overview

The Scrolling Game Development Kit (version 1.2.3 is the latest) is a game creator available for download at http://gamedev.sf.net. (Go to the downloads area and click the first link to download the latest install.) The program is used to create game projects. These projects contain graphics, maps and much other project data that come together to form a complete game that can be played using the GameDev environment. (Don't worry, there are ways of packaging the game up into a self-contained installation too.) A game project consists of one GDP file, any number of MAP files, at least one BMP file and optionally any number of multimedia files (MP3, AVI, WAV, MID etc). I have formed this contest in the hopes of stimulating development with this kit, in order to get some more good complete games. Some examples exist at the project's home site, but most are incomplete. The one complete project ("Rolly the Purple Ball [...]") proves that interesting, complete games are possible using this kit, even if you don't want to utilize the kit's support for VBScript. So take a look at the detailed guidelines below and get started on your epic 2-D game!

Prizes

Initially, there will be 3 prizes being offered to the designers of the top 3 projects submitted in this contest:

1. Grand Prize: US $200
2. First Place: US $100
3. Second Place: US $50

Furthermore, I have arrangments with a software publisher who has offered to review and *possibly* publish some of the entries from this contest. A CD archive of games is to be released after the contest deadline, and if your entry meets their standard of quality, it may be included in this publication, time permitting. Your entry could make it even if you don't win one of the prizes above (AND even if you also won one of the prizes above)! No promises, but yet another reason to submit your best work for this contest. (Details will be released to those whose games make it through. You will be contacted by the publisher, and you will then have a short time in which to supply a signed contract if you want a chance at having your game published.)

I am also opening this up to any sponsors/donors who would like to make this contest even more interesting; please contribute! Any contributions to the prize "jackpot" will be added to the existing allocation of prize money. You may make requests that the money go toward adding additional prize ranks or increasing one of the existing prize levels. While I will try to accommodate such requests, I may have to make overriding decisions on how the prize money will be distributed among the rankings to avoid, for instance, second place being more rewarding than first place. All contributed money will be awarded to contest winners or returned to the donor (for instance, in the unlikely case that there are no entrants).

There are two ways to contribute to the prize pot:

1. Pledge a prize amount: Send an email to BlueMonkMN@email.com indicating your pledged prize amount that you will pay directly to a winner when the results are in. Payment must be payable via PayPal.
2. Contribute to my prize pot: Send PayPal payment to BlueMonkMN@email.com indicating the intention of increasing the prize pot.

All prizes will be awarded via PayPal. The prize recipient must accept payment via PayPal or the donor (including myself) is not obligated to pay the prize, and may award it to another contestant or return it to the donor. Each pledging donor will be held responsible for their own pledges. (I won't be held responsible for pledges that aren't honored.)

Submissions

All files referenced by your project must be included with your submission. This includes:

• Project GDP file
• BMP files containing graphics for tilesets
• MAP files containing data for each map
• Any applicable multimedia files. Make sure you don't use codecs that aren't common -- I have to be able to play the submission in order to judge it. The kit *can* play MP3 files and mp3-encoded wave files (I have the codec for that) but I've noticed that MPG movies don't seem to work well, so use a common AVI format for video.

All files should be in a single directory within an archive (ZIP or RAR) or in a subdirectory of the directory containing the GDP file. The submission should be a single file: a ZIP or RAR archive containing a complete submission. The archive must not exceed 5 MB (5242880 bytes). This is a limitation for practicality. While it may be nice to make a project with dozens of big fancy media clips, it's not practical to store or transfer huge files from many contestants (hopefully I get my DSL line back before contest submissions start rolling in). So I'm afraid I have to add this "artificial" limitation to the contest submission guidelines. If you reach the limit and are using ZIP compression, try switching to RAR and enablng multimedia compression. I've seen this to greatly improve compression rates (on the order of another 30% reduction in size over ZIP).

Assistance

You may employ the work of others in your project, but only one prize will be awarded per project. All data contained in the project must abide by any copyright or distribution license that may apply to that data. Any work provided by a person for a project must be done with the provider's full knowledge of and agreement with the use of that work. Note that additional points for originality may be awarded to works that do not depend on existing free sources of graphics/sound etc.

To be fair, my own assistance will be provided without bias to all contestants and non-contestants for the duration of this project: I will not answer any questions about The Scrolling Game Development Kit or the contest directly, but will instead post any relavent information here.) If you ask me a question related to the contest during the contest, be prepared to have the question and answer publicly published for all contestants (and non contestants) to read. This is not to imply that I will answer any question. If I feel the answer to any question would give an unfair advantage to any one contestant, I will delay the answer for that question until after the deadline for the contest.

Eligibility

Anyone besides myself and my family who is willing to accept payment via PayPal is eligible for the prizes. If someone I know (other than a family member) submits a project I may request third party evaluation of the project to avoid any conflict of interest.

Procedure

Once you have a submission prepared. FTP the submission to ftp.gamedev.net and send a notification email to BlueMonkMN@email.com notifying me that your submission is ready for evaluation. The email should provide your name, the name of the file you have uploaded and your email address.

Deadline

The contest will run approximately 3 months. The deadline for submissions will be 11:59 PM on April 30, 2002 US Central Time (5:59 AM May 1, GMT). At this time the FTP server will become read-only to prevent further submissions.