Thought I'd post a quick video of the end product of the 8 hour game challenge this weekend. Thanks to all those who participated, and look forward to working with you all in the future! I'll probably be adding a link to an install package at some later point if anyone wants to play!

We might wait a few minutes past the official start time, but not forever. By about 5 or 10 minutes in, even if people haven't showed up, I'm going to get started, even if it's alone…

So there are two loose ends that we need to sort out pretty quickly.

1. What time are we doing this thing?

It seems we had tentatively decided in the chat room that we were going to start at 11:00am EDT, which is also 9:00 MDT, and 8:00 PDT. Does that still work for everyone? EDIT: Changed to 30 minutes later. 11:30am EDT, 9:30 MDT, 8:30 EDT.

2. Do we have a team name?

I think it makes sense to put the repository on BitBucket under a team name instead of my name, like we did for the practice session a week ago. But that means we need a team name.

If we can agree on a name by tomorrow morning, I'll create the team and put it there. Otherwise, I'll just put it under my name, and when we come up with a team name, we can transfer it over later on.

The only name that has come up so far is Laser Bear Boss Battle (or something like that?), but I think we can do better than that. (Unless somebody can come up with an epic logo for that team name, which would probably convince me!)

Swatacular (or anyone else who might want to join) if you want to come join things maybe 30 minutes early to the competition, I can give you a quick rundown on Mercurial, TortoiseHg, and BitBucket. It sounds like you've used Git before, which should help.

On Sunday, we decided to give an actual collaboration a shot. We quickly decided to do a Frogger clone game and spent probably about 4 hours getting things set up and rendering. We weren't able to finish the game due to limited time, but I was able to add a little more after RB had to leave for the evening. This was also a great learning experience for me… I didn't get to code much to start with, but I did learn quite a lot of useful new inheritance stuff and was able to pick up a little slack on the back end.

Anyways, just thought I would post a quick video of where we were at after the first day. Still incomplete in that we have -zero- collision detection, but I think we did a good job in the given time and that will give RB something to play around with this week!

Code: https://bitbucket.org/rbwhitaker/testing

Let me start by saying, there's a good bet we won't come away with anything cool or useful, other than a chance to try to build something together. So expectations probably should be kind of low.

But that doesn't mean we shouldn't set a goal of building a simple game.

Let's use this thread as a place to make suggestions and pick one.

I'll start by putting a few suggestions out there…

1. Thrust. In our last month-long challenge, we had a loose theme of Thrust, but I don't think anybody really did much with this game. It might be interesting to try to tackle it for this collab thing.

2. Asteroids. Thrust is a lot like Asteroids, and while I think several of us have already done Asteroids before, this might be a simpler challenge than Thrust.

3. Blockade. This is a DOS game that I played growing up, but I doubt very many people besides me played it. So to summarize, it's a game like Snake, which most people have probably played, but multiplayer. Each player's snake's tail doesn't start disappearing until they're dead (or ever, depending on the settings). You each maneuver around, trying to trap others in. Players get eliminated when they crash into another snake's tail (or head), either by making a mistake, or by getting blocked in and running out of space.

Oh look, here's a downloadable sample! http://dosgamer.com/blockade/ But it looks like you need DosBox or something to run it. I can show you guys a demo of it tonight maybe…

This game might actually be the easiest of these three, but probably also the one you're the least familiar with.

Anyway, let me know what you think of these games, or add your own suggestions!

But that's not what this thread is about. Instead, I want to propose to people a slightly different type of challenge that's collaborative.

In fact, when PiscesMike first started organizing these challenges, the goal was do build something collaboratively. I think we discovered quickly that it was hard to get people involved in a long term (month long) programming project that required collaboration. When we switched to having everybody do their own, we had better success.

Now I want to kind of return to our roots here, and try a mini collaborative project. This would be a 1-day (probably aiming for 8 hours) project where we work together on a (very small) project on a Saturday during the month of August. So there's no long-term commitment. Just clear up your day (or most of it) and join us as we try to make a game!

I don't know the details of how this will work yet. (I have some ideas, but nothing formalized.) So that's something to talk about here in this thread.

One thing I do know is that there's going to be a limit to the number of people that can join us. Or more precisely, there's going to be a limit to the number of people that can be on one team, I think. And this limit will be partially driven by the technology (a free BitBucket account limits you to five people in a repository, but we'll definitely need source control of some sort) and also limited to about the same number from a coordination standpoint. A day is just too short to really build a game with a larger team.

If push comes to shove, I think we'll have to do it on a first-come-first-serve basis, but if we have a lot of people wanting to join, we can always split up and have two or three teams.

At any rate, the sooner you indicate your interest, the better it will be for organizing this thing. We want to make sure everybody who wants to join gets into a team.

Right now, we don't need any sort of formal commitment or anything (we don't even have a specific date yet) just let us know if you're interested!