did you ever think of a time based contest ? something that will start at a given time and end 4 hours later ?

this should be done like this for example :
contest start saturday at 14:00 GMT
at 14:01 the subject of the development(game) can be read on the website.
a counter  begin to count down saying "3h55 left" "3h50 left" etc..
once you finished you submit the game+your nick and a password (the submission time is stamped and can give extra point).
at 16:00 all submission are made public
score maybe based uppon : subject relation, quality,time left on submission

with a maximum project size of 1mb

what I found really interresting is to see the same subject implemented by different people, the time constraint makinf this looking as an exam is also good to warmup brain  I think.

the question is, what do you think of this idea ?

While i'm a big fan of time-limited competitions (like the LD 48 hour ones) I think four hours is a bit too short. With people in all sorts of different time zones you'll find it hard to get people to take part.

Also throwing in a tight time limit with a tight size limit is a bit harsh. My standard util library + LWJGL + Jorbis jars clocks in at about 2Mb and I'm sure other people are in similar positions.

Ooooh, a contest, I'm so there

Assuming the time limit will be enforced only by people's honesty, time zones shouldn't matter. You must use 4 hours in the day specified.

There's no point competing if you're going to break the rules anyway

Kev

I'm definitely down for this if it happens.  4 hours isn't much time, but it's just enough to put together something interesting, and I'm really curious to see what people can do!

Can I throw a suggestion on the floor for discussion? (I'm going to anyways!) I'd say we don't restrict this to Java, even if it's officially run from JGO - allowing Flash and whatever else (as long as it runs on, say, Win/Lin/OSX) will probably increase the turnout substantially, which can only help things.

I'd also prefer a topic or theme based competition, personally, since it gives the competition entries some sort of cohesion.  If you want to do a synchronized competition, this could be helped by only announcing the theme at the start.

Re: size, I'd also rather not have a limit, I think the 4 hour limit itself is a huge enough constraint that it might be overkill to add another one, esp. since as noted some people's technologies of choice clock in near a megabyte to begin with.  I'd rather just let people run wild and see what they can achieve.  With 4 hours to make stuff, I doubt we're going to have entries with 100 mb of data, since the time limit restricts the amount of content you can push out anyways.

a 1mb limit might be good if it excluded any external libraries used, such as lwjgl, jogl, slick, jme, jorbis, etc and only included the game source and data files.

Sounds all good, but I think 4 hours would be a little short, I would mostly miss it.

Ok, I can get behind a 1 megabyte limit with allowances for fatter helper libraries, I just didn't want to restrict people from using decent graphics and sound stuff which often comes bundled in pretty heavy .jars.  I'd suggest as a criteria for this that most libraries are fair to use as long as they are publicly available (either open source or freely usable, i.e. not something you'd have to pay money to get access to) and they must be libraries, not games (Slick or Pulpcore would be fair game, but you can't embed a full game in your app and expect to get away with it).

Re: "no stolen art," by that do you mean all art assets must be created from scratch, or that all art assets must be legit under open licenses or something like that?  Sounds fine by me either way, but let's be explicit.

Any comments on opening this up to non-Java devs?  This is not a huge deal to me, but I do think it could make things a bit more lively.  Then again, as a Mac user I don't relish the idea of a bunch of XNA dudes coming in and making games that will force me to exercise my ugly and much neglected XP partition in order to test...

Hm, that's a good point, it might complicate things a bit too much on the hosting end, too.  I'm fine with just-Java.

So should we open up the discussion as far as a date?  Am I correct to assume that a weekend is the best time to get people while they're free?

that would be a fun contest, unfortunatly since I have thinked about it, I have got and I am still really really really too much busy by social life and other projects to put anything in place for such contest even if I keep this idea in mind... If someone prepare it I may participate but inded that will depend on the chosen date. Nb: 4 hours is maybe finally a bit short