The Ricochet game challenge

The fella who created Ricochet Xtreme is on stage; this next session in the Casual Games all-dayer is the Ricochet Xtreme Game Challenge whereupon he handed over all the game assets, under a Creative Commons license, to five game engine owners.

The idea is, each owner gets 8 hours to create a Ricochet clone using their engine, but the original Ricochet assets. The engines:

• Playground (from PlayFirst) - [alice's score:  5/10: "clunky"]
  
  • building Mac and Web versions took less than 5 mins.
  • completed game: 3.5Mb.
  • free to develop on, do not have to publish with us.
• Macromedia (with Flash) - [alice's score: 7/10 : "works fine"]
  • (had a bug, everyone chuckles)
  • automatic tweening and smoothing
  • $199-499 to license, number of open file format 3rd party tools
• Sun (with Java) - [alice's score: 9/10 : "super smooth!"]
  • open source; free to develop on; Java VM running on 70-80% of new systems
  • "as fast as compiled C on the desktop"
  • can access 3d hardware, audio hardware thru applet
  • free to develop on, has one of biggest developer communities
• PopCap (with developer.popcap.com) - [alice's score: 9/10 : "spangles!"]
  • has cool 'ball cam' : magnifiying glass on action area of game
  • additive particle effects, lots of spangles!
  • extra points to demo guy for using Microsoft Paint jpegs as presentation slides
  • free to use and publish with
• GarageGames (with Torque Game Builder) - [alice's score: 8.5/10 : "fiery trails!"]
  • excellent particle effects
  • possibly less smooth than PopCap or Sun?
  • $100, full source to engine, all tools

Interesting session, although more so for people interested in middleware, and for developers in the room to jostle each other and grin (or worry) over comparative performance.

Great idea though, another fab use of creative commons. I wonder how many of 'em cheated and took longer than 8 hours?

Comments

[Cormac]

Cheat, you posted before the Q&A finished. :)

I think the torque one was noticably stuttery, I'd rate it a little lower. But... I've heard great things about it as an engine and dev environment, so it might be chalked up to a quick dev cycle (they stuck strictly to 8 hours of intern time to make it supposedly. :) )

[Alice]

Right. 8 then. Roger that.

[Pat]

The Torque offering was done entirely in <8 hours, and using TorqueScript. Part of the clunkyness is a result of using TorqueScript for everything to show that you can, in fact, make Ricochet in 8 hours, with our tools, and no C++ coding.

[Alice]

Nice, Pat! I wonder if the other engines can make such claims.

It was a good showing.

[Seb Potter]

I'm a TGB (and TGE & TGEA) licensee, and think it's just about the best development platform I've worked with. (With the exception of documentation which can often be a bit out of date.) The work GG are doing with the XNA framework really puts them at the vanguard of Indie publishers.

Just one thing though - the license for TGB at $100 doesn't give you the source, it's binary and script only. Source licenses (TGB Pro) are a little more expensive at $250.

So, in a way the performance issues from prototyping in Torquescript may well be an accurate reflection of the experience that non-source licensees can expect.

But still, TGB is awesome.

[Eastbeast314]

Hi, I'm the ex-intern who put the TGB demo together, so I can explain the stuttering :)

I did some silly things with the animation manager because of the time constraint and because I hadn't played with level changing before. Basically, when you hit an exploding brick before any others in a level, the game doesn't have any old animations to recycle and so it has to make a whole bunch (one for each brick that's exploding - and load a particle effect for it). It would be an easy thing to fix - but I decided to add the particles instead.

It was definitely less than 8 hours (if it wasn't I would have failed some midterms), and I was actually very suprised at how easy it was to do in TGB.

[Some call me...Tim]

Just stumbled across this page....my (albeit slanted) take on the different versions was very, well, different. Especially the Java version where they took more than the maximum 8 hours just to get it up and running, and then spent 8 more polishing--just to have something that (IMHO) didn't look as good as any of the rest.

And I don't know what you thought was clunky about the Playground version. I thought it was one of the cleanest versions, certainly better than the terribly clunky Flash version. Maybe you got the two confused?