In my desperate efforts to justify my extreme laziness, I think we could try some "extreme' contests, and where for extreme I mean really EXTREME.

For instance an idea I was asking myself is "what is the most fun game you can do where the ONLY thing you can draw on the screen is a ball?" It's a nice "theoretical" question, maybe answering it we could get some intuition on the "theory of fun", i.e. what makes a game playable.

You will be surprised how many things you can think up even with such an incredibly restrictive contraint.

then we can try 2 balls (if you can handle it )

Hm, that's extreme to say the least. While I'm intrigued, I believe that you need to allow some kind of interaction... what if the contest was "draw only balls"? Or "draw three balls, no more, no less"?

Well with just a single ball you can do some kind of reaction game. The ball changes colour and if the the player presses the corresponding key within a certain time then the ball changes direction. The sequence can go on and on in kind of way like the Simon electronic game from the 1970's / 1980's.

Or how about some game where the size of the ball changes depending on the users control and the size and position relative to the centre or edges of the screen affects the outcome?

Or you could try a game where the player has to keep bouncing the ball in a control method similar to the track and field games of the 1980's.

So that is three completely different ideas thrown out to you after only about five minutes thought.

I cannot code any of them as I have no dev tools on this iBook and it will be switched for a Viao on Saturday anyway.

I still like the idea of a zero-graphics game. I.e. audio only.

Dan Potter Wrote:I still like the idea of a zero-graphics game. I.e. audio only.

We did that at CreateMacGames last year. You can read all about it here and you may even be able to download some of the entries.

Why not try doing a game based on the rules we used?

Man, I still have my partially finished entry for that contest. I should dig that out sometime and do something with it.

Yeah, that's where I saw the idea posted before (I'm not that original). Totally cool, IMO.

I've been really happy to see the amount of non-visual stuff in OSX increase in Tiger because one thing I like to do is lower the lid on my laptop on the plane and use the machine without having to worry about the seatback in front of me leaning back and crushing it