So the deadline is here! Before the results are known, I thought it would be cool if people would actually say a few things about themselves and link to it. I will use things posted here in a pilot podcast about the contest if I get enough material. Otherwise I'm sure people would actually like to hear what you have to say via linking to your soundfile on this thread anyways! Try and keep your sound byte short (no more then about 2 mins), and compress in either mp3 or ogg. I've set up an email account at: podcast.gamedev.net@googlemail.com which if you can't host something I'll try and sort something out. Try and keep to this format: 1/ Hi! Your entry name 2/ Your team name & your name(s) + screen names. 3/ It's genre(s) 4/ A paragraph worth of spoken summmary of your game 5/ What tools you used 6/ Biggest problem overcome 7/ Favourite part of game 8/ What you think your chances are 9/ Bye! Obviously anything you post here is in the public domain for free usage of any podcasts to do with gamedev.net, and perhaps the staff might like to keep them for their own promotional ideas for this site too. I can't promise everything will be used though, esp if your post is particularly noisy. If you would like to post any music used in your entries that you own the rights too, and would allow free use in any gamedev.net related podcast - please feel free to post & mail that too. I'll also use this thread as an opportunity too congratulate any that managed to meet the deadline. EDIT: (Hmmm Sound bytes instead of Sound Bites... too cheesy? [smile] ) [Edited by - paulecoyote on November 7, 2005 4:45:36 AM]

1. My entry is called APC's Pro Zombie Puncher 2k6, its an action game.
2/ MY team name is "" and my name is Robert Eastman... OR IS IT?
3/ Its a text adventure. Yeah, you heard me. Actually, its a joke, since I spent so much time on my map editor, I didnt have time to finish a few good chunks of the actual engine.
4/ Did you hear the one about the naked rabbi and the priest? Yes, its a joke, a lot like my entry.
5/ Well, for the most part, aside from 3DS Max and Bloodshed, I haven't used any tools I didn't make myself. Then I gave up and just used Bloodshed. Yup. Fun.
6/ None of them. I didn't finsh. Although I did find a couple of ways to render scenes at a higher framerate.
7/ When you punch the zombie.
8/ One in eight billion. I didnt even use all the required elements.
9/ Bye.

Hmm, I should do this tonight.. or maybe some day after a night in which I get some sleep.

Can't wait to download the entries to try them myself! I bet they're just like shiny diamonds ready to be looked at! Hehe.

Congratulations to all of the contestants who managed to complete their projects! And to the ones who didn't finish, don't be sad. Time can't be thrown away, only turned into experience.

Eh, I lack a microphone at my computer, so here, text version:

1/ Hiya, my name is Megan Fox
2/ We're team Ugly Duckling Development - I'm the lead (correction: only) programmer, and Oscar is the artist. We both did a little of everything, though.
3/ Kasei is an action game, most similar to Ninja Gaiden, Dead or Alive, etc.
4/ We tried to capture a lot of the appeal of a fighting game, without the need to memorize tremendously huge combos. In a sentence, we were aiming for Ninja Gaiden's level of combat, just with only one style (vs Ninja Gaiden's, what, 8? Huge game, that).
5/ We started with our own game engine, which is in turn based on Nebula 2, but this means... well, almost nothing. Nearly everything for the competition we either built from scratch or rewrote through the development process - to start with, all we really had was "guy walking on a non-LOD'ed heightmap with buggy movement code," something you could build from scratch in a month or two easily.
6/ Biggest problems overcome were performence related... the one that we did overcome was learning just how slow our script-based combat control system was - and then having to rewrite the entire damned thing in hard-code. The one we didn't quite overcome was a sort of snowballing physics-related slowdown... turns out ODE + our game engine caused SUPER slowdown as you added more entities to the world, and we didn't test larger worlds until late in development. We fixed what we could, but it still runs much too slowly on min-spec machines. In the end, I think we just aimed a little high for only 3 months of development.
7/ I'm happy with the combat. It needs a lot of work, the AI could use more controls, but what we did I'm very happy with. The movements are crisp, the parrying works well, the hit detection tends to be spot-on, and it all just "feels" pretty solid.
8/ That depends... two things make me think we won't win: we couldn't hit the min-spec with our desired performence, and those same performence issues prevented us from putting a sufficiently large number of enemies in the stage at once. If either of those things end up being non-issues for the judges (maybe they'll think our min-spec perf is acceptable, or maybe they'll find the combat is enjoyable enough to replay it multiple times in lieu of a single, large level), then I think our entry is quite solid.
9/ Dewa.

This is going to be interesting... we've got a few very solid 3D titles (both simple and advanced), at least one solid isometric game, Ninja loves Pirate is a really solid sidescroller... etc.

I just hope I'm not the only one that keeps developing - I want more levels of Ninja loves Pirate, and I'd love to see a few of these others keep going too.

[Edited by - meganfox on November 1, 2005 5:51:23 PM]

Alrighty, well any whom really want to do this little sound byte and don't have the recording equipment, email me your phone number (podcast.gamedev.net@googlemail.com) and a time between 6PM and 10PM GMT over the next few days when I can call. I can't see that many of you going for that (giving out your number to some guy on the net!) but well I'm not sure how else I can help those whom want to say something but don't have the equipment. Give me a chance to properly test out this telephone recording gadget I've got, and better gauge how interested people are in this.

Personally I think loads of you must use Teamspeak, or have usb headphones for your PS2 etc that you could use if you were actually interested!

Seems there have been quite a few views, but not many replies. Lots of Voyeurs! [smile]

Anyway this is all giving me a bit of a gauge about if there is enough community interest to drive a community podcast!

I'd like to record something. I'll see if I can do it this evening. :)

1/ Archipelago
2/ Me, Sirob & Roderick.
3/ RTS
4/
You play a general sent to protect a valuable resource on a remote island group from pirates trying to steal and sell it. Before long, robots appear from space and begin mining it as it is very useful to them for their spacecraft propulsion.
The pirates are much weaker than you and the robots are REALLY hard.
5/ C++.
6/ Getting artwork - I didn't do it but getting a modeller was a major worry.
7/ Favourite part: actually having a game I can sit down and play for an hour, which I find engrossing and quite challenging. It's at a state where I'm not constantly being reminded of bugs and missing features anymore - I played it at 2am while waiting 90min for the entry to upload over dialup and it kept me awake!
8/ Slim, seeing a couple of other games in this genre, and how I didn't get sound in. I want to be in the upper league of big entries (top 10 hopefully) but that's about it.

Hi!

I made this not too good quality recording of me talking! << and it's 2:42 long (sorry about the lenght) , so you better listen to it .. or else! ;)

Excuse my thinking pauses. :P I was thinking about another things ... ;) and english isn't my native language either.

Listen here! (Right click and Save target as .. )



-Eigen

Quote: Original post by Eigen
Hi!

I made this not too good quality recording of me talking! << and it's 2:42 long (sorry about the lenght) , so you better listen to it .. or else! ;)

Excuse my thinking pauses. :P I was thinking about another things ... ;) and english isn't my native language either.

Listen here! (Right click and Save target as .. )



-Eigen

Awesome! This is great stuff, exactly what I thought might interest people. I certainly found it interesting [smile]. Well done for getting the ball rolling!

Don't worry about the length, it was just a guideline. I was just trying to encourage brievity. [wink]

by the way, you seem to have to left click it, and then a dialog pops up that lets you save. In firefox anyways.