This is a really enjoyable video, especially if you've ever dabbled in game development. By happenstance I sat next to Sid Meier on a bus at E3 a few years ago. He seemed every bit as friendly and gracious as the video portrays, which is great to see from someone who's firmly at "legend" status.
Any language/platform is welcome. I don't think anyone has been crazy enough to try to write a game in lisp yet but of any of the FP junkies here want to try it, that would be cool to see.
Your last comment reminded me of this guy's entry "toy game" for LD10, http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2007/12/16/working-title-ruck... made in Common Lisp. I think I remember seeing a Scheme game at some point... But yeah, lots of languages and libraries make a showing and people make some awesome stuff.
Civilization has been a blight on my family. My dad brought it home from a trip once only to have it contaminate first his brain, then mine. For years, one of us would hide the thing or break the CD or just throw it out only to eventually buy another copy or a new version when it comes out, being careful to ignore the fact that we were both hopeless addicts.
The problem with the Civ games is that they make it easy to get into "flow" state where you're just clicking around, doing stuff, constantly stimulated etc. It's trouble, trouble I say.
I remember when my dad called me to ask if I'd taken his Civ III CD back to Chicago with me. "I've been looking around for it," he said meekly. I told him, yes, I took it, but had recently snapped it in two. There was a pause before he said "It's probably for the better."
I love stuff like this. I get so inspired when I see "Pirates of Silicon Valley" or "Revenge of the nerds" or any other movie/documentary about computer history. Please tell me if there's any other good computer history movies/documentaries!
I assume competitions like this have a liberal policy about using pre-existing game/rendering engines else you could use up all your time piecing together the low-level foundation and not get to any actual game design.
One of the most gratifying things about the "Game Jam" is that it puts all those flame wars over development environments to the test.
Most of the time, the people who stick to C/C++ tend to get demolished by the overhead of fighting the compiler. There are always exceptions - especially since the tiny scope means that code isn't the only bottleneck - but for the most part, it's shown very clearly that making games in a short period requires fast code iteration.
It became very clear with Meier's game and the Magician one, and it kinda make the competition unfair, but it didn't seem to bother anyone. Or at least not in front of the cameras.
I'll probably get hunted down and killed by this, but I think they could do much better if they used Flash. For really quick projects, it's about as good as a game making program can get.
Any chance there's some way of modifying the buffering in that video? It's excruciating to watch it stutter through every frame, when I know that 10x-ing the buffer size would completely solve my problem.
(This is a fundamental issue with Flash video players.)
I didn't had that problem but, was it just me or weren't there any controls on the thing? I couldn't pause it or anything. Near the end the dog decided to take a dump on the carpet and I had sit through the whole thing again after I cleaned it up.
I didn't have any of those problems, actually. The video played fine and I had controls the whole way through. FF 3.6 on an outdated Ubuntu distro here, which I would have expected to have its share of problems if normal systems did.
With its length, it seems perfect for some kind of 30-minute episode on a channel like G4. The production was pretty good in my opinion.
I agree about the development tools. Another thing I kind of missed was that I felt they could have shown the top few games (and Sid's) being played more than the brief snippets they gave us.
