The Big C Game Competition

Thanks to Slamdance for its submission. Coming up at The Slamdance Film festival in Park City, Utah - Jan. 21 to 28 2005, programmers can compete in The Big C Independent Game Competition. "The Big C is calling for entries of all new games from emerging talent. Selected games will compete and be judged by festival attendees, with a Jury Award and Audience Award that include cash and prizes presented at the end of the festival. Game submissions should have an early-postmarked deadline of Oct. 1, 2004 and a final postmarked deadline of Nov. 14, 2004. Entrants may submit games on disk or provide a URL for judges to download." The event has an entry on the Gamasutra Calendar, for additional info.

Re:Gah

[UnknownSoldier]

> Who writes games in C anymore?

Console programmers with a legacy codebase.

We don't have a choice for bindings to the thin-vineer of an OS, so it's either C or C++. Most C programmers switch over to C++ because of the new paradigms the language lets you express natively, and fortunately the language is backwards compatible. (Its strength is also its weakness.)

I'm not sure why you got modded down as flamebait. Any language is unsafe. Some just make it easier to use & abuse then others :) Calling C safe shows that the mod doesn't understand (or have a clue) exactly what dangerious low level programming C allows, and obsviously they never had to spend any time tracing through (malloc) memory leaks. Blah.

Oh well...

--
Original, Fun Palm games by the Lead Designer of Majesty!
http://www.arcanejourneys.com/ [arcanejourneys.com]

Re:Gah

[RQuinn]

It's not a competition to use the C programming language to make games. It's the "BIG C" which stands for Bawls Independant Game Competition. Stupid name, and I had to look through the pdf press release to figure it out, but what do you expect from a film festival?

They really don't seem to know what they are getting into. They say if your game needs extra hardware (like vr glasses) then you need to supply it, but they don't say if the game is to be run on a Windows machine, or an OSX machine, or anything. There is just a field on the entry form for "System Requirements."

The lack of information was enough to scare me off from it, let alone the 49.99$ entry fee. I'll give them points for trying to branch into something new, though.

Re:Platform?

[slashrogue]

The application has a spot for "System Requirements" as well as the rules-mentioned "Additional Hardware" so I would guess it's whatever you want to write it in.

Re:Mod authors?

[Gothic_Walrus]

While it doesn't say anything in the rules, I'm assuming that they would have issues with the fact that the engine and (potentially) tools and concepts aren't original. It seems like they're looking for games that are completely original, and mods build very, very heavily off of material that has had millions of dollars and thousands of hours poured into it.

You'd have to e-mail them and ask them, but I'd say "no."

Re:Gah

[GigsVT]

It was just a joke, because the organizers named it "big C", and idiots that they seem to be, they don't realize that is a programming language, and thus a confusing name for a programming contest.

Sigh.