Sid Meier and the 48-Hour Game 58
MMBK writes "Sid Meier is possibly the most influential game designer ever, having developed the Civilization series, among others. This video documentary looks at his past while he travels to the University of Michigan for the 48-hour game design competition, which was hosted by his son."
Re:Not commercially meaningful? (Score:3, Informative)
now why would a mime do that?
Despite being trapped in a glass box, a painfully high wind inevitably rises up, and no amount of invisible rope is going to save you from a pummeling. I mean, you're trapped in a box made of glass! Many of them can't take the pressure and mime shooting themselves in the head. A lot of them miss -- with an invisible gun and bullets, this is perhaps inevitable -- but many hit their mark all too well, causing a great red flower to burst from their temples.
Mimes are a truly misunderstood underclass, deserving of our pity, not our scorn.
Re:Hi Everyone (Score:3, Informative)
Anyone is allowed to write their own library before the contest and submit their code for approval.
1. We need to verify that any such library doesn't contain 99% of a game, just waiting for them to make a few tweaks to fit the theme.
2. We need to verify that the library's license allows anyone to use it for free, and allows us to distribute the games produced for free.
3. We need to give others time to learn how to use the custom libraries, or it doesn't matter that the licensing is permissive.
4. If we know what libraries are capable of, it makes judging effort a lot easier.
You're right that there would be some issues with allowing mods in such a contest, but no, it hasn't come up yet. Still, we would know that we can redistribute the mod for free. We would also know that a lot of work was done for them, so we would be able to take that into account during the judging. Perhaps we should officially disallow mods, but I don't think that making a non-trivial mod for a commercial game in 48 hours would be easy, so it might be an interesting challenge for some of our members in the future. It is an interesting point that the developers would normally have the game's sound/music/graphics available to them when making a mod. By the current rules, I'm not sure that they would be able to use the graphics, but we'd probably have to allow the use of at least some graphical assets provided with the game. We would ask the developers to make it clear to us what assets they actually created.
The only languages I've seen used are C++, C#, Java, and Flash. Libraries commonly used include SDL, OpenGL, zenilib, XNA, ClanLib, and SFML.