Rule-O-Matic

Don't read too much into the results of these sample spins! The method of picking rules is yet to be tweaked to its full potential, and until a good selection of rules have been added, it's rather meaningless.

Once the Rule-O-Matic has been spun for a final time, the authors of the selected rules will be contacted in order to add clarifications and last minute twists. They won't be allowed to do anything drastic, and to limit their advantage of a heads up, they won't know for sure which of the rules atually were selected. (For example, they may be notified that one of three specific rules have been selected.)

Here is a sample spin, with the following rules being chosen:

1. Genre requirements

   Traveling salesman (Great)

   The goal of the game must be to reach certain locations, but they may be visited in any order.

2. Technical requirements

   There is 1 technical requirement:

   Dynamic Lighting (Good)

   Your game must implement some form of dynamic lighting scheme. Why? Because static lights suck. For example, the main character can have a light that illuminates the path directly in front of them (or wherever they are aiming). You could have lamps that illuminate the area directly beneath them. You could even have evil robots with glowing red eyes that illuminate a small area in front of the robot. Use your imagination!

3. Artistic requirements

   There are 2 artistic requirements:

   Colorscale (Mediocre)

   All the game must be in 256 grayscale color and
   you can change, during gameplay, the color scheme in grayscale, bluescale, redscale, yellowscale ....

   bad vision (Mediocre)

   the quality of the vision of the player must decrease during the game to increase the difficulty

4. Bonus rules

   There are 2 bonus rules:

   Act of Goatee (OK)

   If all characters in the game have a beard, you may opt out of one other rule.

   Act of Act of Recursiveness (Good)

   Clever use of recursiveness will give bonus. It could be a code thing or something in the graphics. It could even be the way you interprete a rule. If one rule says you have to save a princess, you could make a game where a princess has to save a princess.

5. Other Important Info

   All entries must comply with all requirements except where nullified by Act of Dog.

   All entries must be submitted on or before 12:00 UTC on Monday 25th July without fail. All entries must be supplied in a ZIP file equal to or less than 250 KB in size. All source code, makefiles, documentation, and references to additional libraries used must be supplied in the ZIP file.

   You can assume that everyone will have a copy of Allegro (standard installation) installed. You do not need to supply one. It is okay to use a more recent version of Allegro, but if someone is unable to compile your game because of that, it's your fault. You should consider uploading binaries for people who have problems compiling the source onto your own website. I will be checking that the binary and source match up, so adding enhancements to the 'competition binary' is not permitted..

   If source code is reused from legal sources (your own, GPLed, public domain) you should declare this and what changes have been made, so that your work can be assessed for the voting.

   People should keep a informative and interesting account of their development through the competition. This can be sent after the competition for those people with no Internet access over the weekend. This does not affect your space requirement.

   A web-based "blog" update page will be available. This will allow spectators to see what is going on :-)

   You can make use of all information sources, mailing lists as you see fit. This is not an exam! :-)