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Socoder -> On Topic -> Rapid Development
Sat, 28 Feb 2009, 06:25
discharge
 		What with you guys having the weekly/monthly workshops I figured you guys might have some insight into this My uni's planning to host an XNA competition where teams have 48 hours to produce a game. Nothing else has been detailed so we can't prepare anything specific in advance

I did some quick brainstorming and some kind of generic top down shooter, platformer or racing game would probably be pretty easy to get down in the time limit. Are there any particular genres of games or gameplay aspects you guys like to work with under a time limit? I haven't really done anything with such a strict deadline before so I thought I'd see what other people have to say about it ^_^
Sat, 28 Feb 2009, 06:59
Jayenkai
 		With a short deadline, using procedural/purely random data is much easier. You can get the engine to whack together a bunch of levels/tracks/waves/etc, and focus on just making the game to fit it.
In fact, start with the procedural level first, and then fit the game around what it comes up with, as opposed to desperately trying to get a procedural engine to build something that magically fits your game.

With 48 hours, any game'd do! (Since most of my WW's nowadays are taking me just a few hours!! .. fuck.. I really oughta do something with all this!)

-=-=-
''Load, Next List!''
Sat, 28 Feb 2009, 07:09
Phoenix
 		As Jay said, what really consumes time is content creation; art, sound, music, levels, etc. Either you implement some clever way of generating it procedurally, or you have very little of it all (or you're Ganesha, in which case you'd probably be disqualified )

You could cheat and start making content beforehand, though.
Sat, 28 Feb 2009, 07:39
JL235
 		You could definitely start making some generic content, like the main loop, collision handling algorithms, loading screens and preloading content, title screen, end-screen, etc. Small stuff that could easily be modified/extended later for your specific game. At the very least just gather together lots of the stuff you've already gotten built in the past.

But I agree it's the polishing that takes up 90% of time.
Sun, 01 Mar 2009, 11:43
discharge
 		Yeah, we're thinking less features, more shiny graphics to make it look nicer.

Procedural content isn't something I'd really thought about for this, but it does make sense so I'll definitely be bearing that in mind. Problem with making content beforehand is not knowing the theme, but we have someone who's pretty adapt at art (which definitely isn't me -.-) so fingers crossed that will be a minor issue.

Cheers for the input guys. Gotta relearn XNA shortly and might give a quick demo a go