The Second Annual Festive Amiga Game Making Competition

[Cammy]

Seasons Greetings! In the spirit of Christmas, and due to the previous year's success we are hosting the Second Annual Festive Amiga Game Making Competition!

This year the competition is very much the same as it was last year, except you now have three full weeks to work on your game rather than two. Remember we had seven playable entries made within the time limit last year, so don't doubt yourselves about being able to get something basic produced before Christmas, you can do it! I believe in you!

Last year we had some prizes on offer, but unfortunately I have nothing left to offer as prizes to the winners of this year's competition. Regrettably I also had trouble trying to save enough money to have the certificates printed and send the prizes out, so I'd rather not promise awards this time around unless anyone else is willing to help by donating Amiga-related hardware, software or money to help pay for the postage of the prizes.

Nevertheless, I think there is more fun to be had making games for the Amiga than winning prizes, so I really hope you will consider giving it a go. It's rewarding to see people enjoying the work you've put into something, helping out and making people happy are in the spirit of the season too!

The rules are pretty easy going:

1. You have until December 24th to finish your entry, that gives you a full three weeks from the starting date. If your game isn't finished by Christmas Eve, upload what you have finished so far anyway, just try to make sure it's playable.
2. Your game must run on a classic OCS or AGA Amiga. This way, anyone should be able to play all the games, either on their old hardware or through UAE. Unfortunately OS4, Aros and MorphOS specific entries at this stage wouldn't reach enough people and couldn't compete for votes.
3. You can create your game with any software you like. This includes programming it yourself too. If you have no coding knowledge, feel free to use any of the available game making software such as Backbone, SEUCK, GRAC, GRAAL, Reality, Game Engine, or anything else you can find.
4. Your game must be themed around Christmas or the festive season. It doesn't necessarily have to contain religious references, but it must be identifiable. Try to make something you or a child you know would enjoy playing during the holidays.

That's all there is to it, hopefully the rules are lenient enough for anyone to be able to contribute. I will post further details about where the games should be uploaded, and if there will be any prizes this year once I have more information, hopefully we'll build this into something worthwhile over the next few weeks.

I hope everyone has a happy festive season and that we get some fabulous new Amiga games to play again this year.

For more information about the previous year's competition and links to the games that were made, check out the Amiga Christmas Tree website. At the moment it's still last year's site, but I will start working on one for this year soon and have a link to the two previous years from there. http://amigachristmastree.ultimateamiga.co.uk/

(I hope it's appropriate for me to post this here.)

[qubodup]

Could you recommend game engines which run on Amiga but also support other popular OSes like Linux (and Windows and OSX)?

[Cammy]

Unfortunately there are no cross-platform game engines that are really compatible with old classic Amigas, except for maybe SCUMMVM. SDL on Amiga requires a retargetable graphics card, so an SDL game wouldn't run on the OCS, ECS or AGA chipsets unfortunately. There just aren't enough developers in the Amiga community to keep up with the latest developments on other platforms, but we do have some pretty good game making software from back in the 80s and 90s. I guess the good news is anything that runs on a classic Amiga should easily run on any modern PC, console or mobile phone through emulation. If you are interested and can set up an Amiga emulator, here is some useful software to quickly make games without learning to program first:

Backbone - Easily build your own platform games and overhead multi-directional shooters.

The full Backbone game making package - http://aminet.net/package/dev/misc/Backbone_Full
Final update for Backbone - http://aminet.net/package/dev/misc/Backbone_Upd
Free keyfile to unlock all Backbone's features - http://aminet.net/package/dev/misc/Backbone_Key


GRaphic Adventure Creator and GRaphic Adventure Authoring Language - Create your own Point & Click Adventure games.

Full GRAC 2 package - http://aminet.net/package/game/role/GRAC2
Extras for GRAC 2 - http://aminet.net/package/game/role/GRACUser1
Intro creator for GRAC 2 - http://aminet.net/package/game/role/IntroCreate
GRAAL 2.3 A - http://aminet.net/package/game/role/graal2a
GRAAL 2.3 B - http://aminet.net/package/game/role/graal2b
GRAAL 2.3 C - http://aminet.net/package/game/role/graal2c
GRAAL 2.3 D - http://aminet.net/package/game/role/graal2d


3D Game Creator - Create your own three dimensional game worlds.

3D Game Creator - http://aminet.net/game/shoot/DBIB.lha

Here's an essential application that should be installed on all Amiga systems, it's perfect for importing GIFs and PNGs of sprites and graphics found on the web, editing them, and saving out as Amiga IFF/ILBM format to use in your games:

Personal Paint - http://aminet.net/package/biz/cloan/PPaint

I'm running this competition over several Amiga and game development forums, so although it might not appear too popular here we'll surely get a few entries by the end and hopefully they'll be fun to play. Of course anyone who makes a game for the competition is welcome to expand on it and port it to other systems if they want.