Give the general public of Unity, RPGmaker, and any other game-making program up to 2 hours to create a game. To enter, they’d have to donate a dollar to a paypal account.
After let’s say… 2 days? A list of the games will be posted, and the time to accept them will be finished. The game that has 5 votes will be the winner. (This is still a work in progress.)
First Prize: 1/2 of the amount of money that is accumulated.
Second: 1/3 of the amount of money.
Third: 1/4
That sounds fair, no?
I’m being serious on this whole matter, as well. If enough people are interested, i will set up paypal account, and work from there. You need paypal, or some way to donate, of course.
For something like RPG Maker or RPG Toolkit, I could see a contest like this being fun.
For something like Unity…not so much, just because of the workflow to create even a simple game.
This could be mitigated by providing contestants a predefined set of assets (code, sprites, music), and asking them to create something from those, sort of like a Game Designer edition of Chopped.
…Actually, the Game Designer edition of Chopped could be a really good idea. Hmm…
Yeah, there’s simply not enough time in an hour to set up a game engine and the basic elements of a game. I’ve watched a few livestreams of Ludum Dare, where the developer will spend at least two hours just making the rendering engine. In my own experience - where there’s been no time limit - I spend a couple of hours nailing down the player movement.
I think - even though an hour is a nice round number - it would have to be increased to two hours, and there would have to be a lot of available assets. Most of the assets should be art - almost no code should be provided. (beyond the usual Unity suspects like First Person Controller) That way, there’s a potential for entries to have very different gameplay - if you provide code and not art, then all the games will be basically the same with different graphics.
I saw it. I didn’t think it was worth derailing the thread for it.
I think a huge part of being able to make a game in a short time is having things ready. If I’m starting from scratch, it’ll take me an hour to get the menus ready for the game, even using the basic GUI. Instead, I could have a set of scripts (and prefabs) ready, and just throw them in in seconds. If you pre-plan and have all the stuff ready, it becomes a lot easier to get something fun written in a short time. I don’t know if an hour is long enough for anything non-trivial, though.