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

   Reverse genre (Excellent)

   Pick any common genre and reverse the role that the player has on it. For example, you'd control the aliens in Alien Invaders, the ball in Pong, the minions in dungeon crawling games, the ghosts in Pac-Man, etc.

2. Technical requirements

   There are 2 technical requirements:

   Error Message (OK)

   Your game must contain a false error message at some point. Include it in an unexpected and creative way

   Go Procedural! (Excellent)

   Some element of your game must be generated procedurally. Good candidates for procedural generation are levels, graphics or sound effects.
   
   Extra kudos if all elements of your game are generated procedurally.

3. Artistic requirements

   There are 2 artistic requirements:

   Dying in various ways (Mediocre)

   The player don't dye in a simple way. Depending of the way he/she dies, the animation or videos of the death are diferent. If a fireball kills the player then he/she burns, if lots of sharp blades hits it, the player will be sliced, if a bomb explodes near it, he/she will be reduced into ashes. And so on...

   Day and Night (Great)

   The game must feature both day and night, and the gameplay during the day must be in some way different than gameplay during the night.

4. Bonus rules

   There is 1 bonus rule:

   Act of Sequel (Great)

   Pick a game from the previous speedhack competition and make a sequel to it! Pick up to two rules in this competition and replace them with rules from that year's competition.

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! :-)