Developer Contest

vermeer · Post by **vermeer** » Sun Oct 28, 2007 6:32 pm

er..dave perry has been famous in game development since archaic times...

yet tho, is hard to track every bit about game development, has become huge..

rogerborg · Post by **rogerborg** » Mon Oct 29, 2007 1:20 pm

sio2 wrote:
rogerborg wrote:why would they give it to Acclaim for a token $100K when they could take it to a real publisher for $millions instead?
Does the "sign your team up now!" action tie a team into Acclaim, I wonder?

I doubt it; it's on a third party web site. However, at some point Acclaim are going to try to lock developers in, at least with first refusal rights. They are going to provide test resources, and so will have an implicit claim. Absent an explicit contract, the transfer of value will create an implicit one. Implicit contracts are never a good idea.

I do respect Dave Perry, but unless he controls his own budget, and can tell Acclaim's legal department what to do, then his word isn't worth the electrons it takes to send it down the wire.

sio2 wrote:Also, am I right in that there is a secondary "prize" of the "winner(s)" becoming a Director of a future "guaranteed" project. Perhaps this is the primary goal...

For one person, who isn't necessarily going to be from the winning dev team, especially given that they'll most likely be developing under the radar. It's as likely to go to one of the designers, or the most prolific forum whore.

And "guaranteed"? You're likely to be given Acclaim's equivalent of Duke Nuken Forever, so that it can die with your name on it.

Virion wrote:9Dragons/2Moons aren't that popular in Asia...

Google for 2Moons hacks, specifically this collection and you'll see why I suspect that nuAcclaim don't really have a clue what they're doing. Playing catch-up with hackers after you've gone gold is like trying to switch off a chainsaw after you've started juggling it.

mjuricek · Post by **mjuricek** » Mon Oct 29, 2007 1:27 pm

Like I mentioned eariler, the rules being clarified (they finally listened). I have been spamming dp's email since the day I got my first responses from you guys. And I appreciate it, even most of them were negative, but it helped alot.
Same with the date. Most likely it will be pushed back. We would like to orginize a meetings with dev teams and David will be there to answer all questions. As far as the demo and milestones, they been always optional. It was ment for dev teams to get feedback and perhaps some valuable comments from the community. Over all community will pick the winner, after David picks 5 finalists.
Acclaim will pay standart dev royalties (those in the industry might already know the numbers).

core technical requirements, such as server load, reliability or architectural robustness.

this was left open for devs to decide

what else might they suddenly "clarify", and when? For example, when will they get round to specifying the requirements for the absolutely mandatory (but currently glossed over) in-game stores where they'll make their money?

the design of the game is in progress as well and let's say your team needs these requirements now, give us feedback and we will prioritize a task for community to make decision. ANd you are more then welcome to participate in design. We received already alot of questions about particuar things from some teams and we are pushing those to be answered. Like I said teams will get full community support.

P.S
And I don't mind you being cynical at all.

Virion · Post by **Virion** » Mon Oct 29, 2007 1:42 pm

Actually I joined the Proj T.S when it first announced. Was boring that time so i decided to watch the progress. The only thing I've done was a concept art. I was one of the guys who suggested fantasy-styled racing game.

My rough art: http://fc02.deviantart.com/fs15/f/2007/ ... zhieng.jpg

But then, the ideas wrote by most of the community members dropped my spec... I lol'ed and quit the project.

mjuricek · Post by **mjuricek** » Mon Oct 29, 2007 1:47 pm

rogerborg wrote:I doubt it; it's on a third party web site. However, at some point Acclaim are going to try to lock developers in, at least with first refusal rights. They are going to provide test resources, and so will have an implicit claim. Absent an explicit contract, the transfer of value will create an implicit one. Implicit contracts are never a good idea.

I do respect Dave Perry, but unless he controls his own budget, and can tell Acclaim's legal department what to do, then his word isn't worth the electrons it takes to send it down the wire.

The forums are hosted on Acclaim's site, but videogameteam.com is dp's website. It is much easier and faster to get write access to those pages then to accliam's. I believe that he has some "say so" if the rules are being clarified and dates being pushed back, the title changed from MMO to scalable multiplayer game.

rogerborg wrote:
sio2 wrote:Also, am I right in that there is a secondary "prize" of the "winner(s)" becoming a Director of a future "guaranteed" project. Perhaps this is the primary goal...
For one person, who isn't necessarily going to be from the winning dev team, especially given that they'll most likely be developing under the radar. It's as likely to go to one of the designers, or the most prolific forum whore.

that is actually the main prize. It is not ment for developers, but if any of them paticipate activelly enough, who knows. No one knows the criteria that dp will based upon. There was a rush about it in the begginings. I was against the whole idea because people would just compete against each other. Now I guess it was forgotten and the rush is over and people are cooperating more.

rogerborg wrote: And "guaranteed"? You're likely to be given Acclaim's equivalent of Duke Nuken Forever, so that it can die with your name on it.

Isn't that up to you to make it so it won't die?

rogerborg · Post by **rogerborg** » Mon Oct 29, 2007 4:13 pm

Thanks for taking the time to keep us informed, mjuricek.

I should be clear that despite the skepticism, I really do hope that TS produces something. It's a brave experiment.

Virion · Post by **Virion** » Tue Oct 30, 2007 6:17 am

By the way, are you from Malaysia, mjuricek? I saw your post at IGDA forum (malaysia chapter)... here

sio2 · Post by **sio2** » Tue Oct 30, 2007 9:51 am

I'm curious - does anyone know of anything similar to this that came to fruition? That is, a team-based competition that results in a commercial game? I know that there are game mods that have been popular enough to become commercial but is it relevant to include these (as they are the result of a different motivation)?

rogerborg · Post by **rogerborg** » Tue Oct 30, 2007 11:49 am

There was Tux Racer, but that was really a single-developer project that went open source and then 'commercial' (with apparently limited success) in quick succession. I can't think of a genuine community project that's gone commercial.

The development history of Tux Racer highlights one of the pitfalls of trying to commercialise a community project: who owns the rights?

Project TS is going to have this problem. For example, artwork is already being made available, but the license terms aren't clear. Are the rights to submitted 'community' artwork transferred to Acclaim, or just licensed, and under what terms? What are the licensing or sub-licensing terms for dev teams? At what point do dev teams gain and lose the explicit or implicit license to use 'community' artwork, given that they're never actually required to sign up to the project?

Within the dev teams, there's the issue of who owns the rights to contributed code. Are individuals retaining the rights to their own code, or assigning or licensing them to a team corporation? Who own the corporate entity, or how is the code licensed to it? (Incidentally, when I submit Irrlicht patches, I very deliberately leave Niko as the sole copyright owner, to avoid doubt).

All of this is largely moot for the dev teams that fail, but imagine the situation if one actually succeeds. Presumably each member of that team will have full access to the code base. What if one of them decides that they don't really want a small share of $100K (presuming that they even trust the team lead to distribute it), and instead decides to take the entire game to another publisher, claiming it as their work? What if the whole team except the lead (who may not even have written any code, but may technically own the rights to it all) do so, or what if it's the team lead / corporation owner that jumps ship with all the legal rights, and the rest of the team find themselves legally unable to actually deliver anything to Acclaim.

The thing is, any team that doesn't consider this issue up front is planning for failure. If they really expect to deliver a commercial product, then they need to treat rights and licensing seriously. How many of them will do that, I wonder?

mjuricek · Post by **mjuricek** » Tue Oct 30, 2007 1:23 pm

Virion wrote:By the way, are you from Malaysia, mjuricek? I saw your post at IGDA forum (malaysia chapter)... here

I'm from florida, USA.
And yes I posted on several IDGA chapters, but before I posted I asked for permission (in this case from Hilmy)

rogerborg wrote: Are the rights to submitted 'community' artwork transferred to Acclaim, or just licensed, and under what terms? What are the licensing or sub-licensing terms for dev teams? At what point do dev teams gain and lose the explicit or implicit license to use 'community' artwork, given that they're never actually required to sign up to the project?

I will have to get you answers to these from dp. I don't know the answer to this.

rogerborg wrote: Within the dev teams, there's the issue of who owns the rights to contributed code. Are individuals retaining the rights to their own code, or assigning or licensing them to a team corporation? Who own the corporate entity, or how is the code licensed to it? (Incidentally, when I submit Irrlicht patches, I very deliberately leave Niko as the sole copyright owner, to avoid doubt).

this would be up to you i believe. If you make yourself a team, that would be up to you guys.

rogerborg wrote:How many of them will do that, I wonder?

Thanks again for another good comment.
I will bring this up on our AB meeting tonight. We will perhaps send out a questionarie to all teams to see how they handle it.

mjuricek · Post by **mjuricek** » Fri Nov 02, 2007 1:05 pm

just an update for you guys

dp had meeting with dev that are participating (2 teams showed up). 1 team had already POC demo video and even playable demo. And it didn't look bad. They are using source engine. If you interested to see what they came up with in such a short time I can give you the link

sio2 · Post by **sio2** » Fri Nov 02, 2007 2:12 pm

mjuricek wrote:If you interested to see what they came up with in such a short time I can give you the link

Yes, please post the link. I'm sure I'm not the only one who'd be interested in taking a look.

Virion · Post by **Virion** » Sat Nov 03, 2007 4:00 am

sio2 wrote:
mjuricek wrote:If you interested to see what they came up with in such a short time I can give you the link
Yes, please post the link. I'm sure I'm not the only one who'd be interested in taking a look.

I'll second that.

mjuricek · Post by **mjuricek** » Sat Nov 03, 2007 11:40 pm

http://www.mercilessdevelopment.com/top ... _large.wmv

keep in mind video was done after very short time after joining the contest.

rogerborg · Post by **rogerborg** » Mon Nov 05, 2007 12:16 pm

mjuricek wrote:http://www.mercilessdevelopment.com/top ... _large.wmv

keep in mind video was done after very short time after joining the contest.

Eh. So they modelled an enclosed oval and then ran it in a more-or-less stock Source app, grabbed ten seconds of footage and pimped it up with some music and annoying cuts.

It's the right way to go, it's just that effort spent on demos (at this stage) is effort wasted; to whom are they marketing it, and why?