And so here it is: the briefly awaited, second ever, YoYo Games competition! Riding hot on the heels of our very successful
Winter Competition, we're hoping to see a crop of games to match the exceptional standard set in that contest.
The Theme
Ancient Civilization! Not just the Romans, Greeks, and Egyptians, but also the Mayans, Aztecs, Vikings, and Celts (to name but a few). So many lands, empires, city states, peoples, cultures, beliefs, and symbols. So much food for your fertile imaginations.
As with the winter theme we've kept the constraints on competition games deliberately low, hopefully this will result in even more really creative games.
The games will be judged on creativity, originality, aesthetics, and game mechanics. With marks, as usual, for the best implementation of the theme.
A word of warning, we're looking for fun games to play, not epics - if you feel your game's strongest asset is its incredibly long and developed plot-line it most likely will not do well in this competition, be sure your games are fun to play from the outset. For the committed entrant the
IGDA casual gaming 2006 white paper has an interesting (but long) analysis of what a good casual game should be (pdf).
Judging will be conducted by YoYo Games and Prof. Overmars. As with the last competition the community response will be taken into account when we come to judge the games (with special weighting given to play count and number of Diggs).
So even if you don't enter the competition yourself, you can still contribute by trying out the games. However, we do ask that the entrants themselves do not rate competition games (on pain of disqualification!).
We've giving the developers a bit longer this time round; the contest will end on
April 27th, 2008.