Awesome contest.. I hope I can find some time to join in, cause I'm swarmed with ideas on what to do..
Btw, jcl is right. Why try to bring in complex model shapes and music in a non-resources contest? I mean, that's why all the other contests before this one were for. Wouldn't it be better to concentrate on the strong points of a non-resources contest, instead of trying to.. buffer everything?
I couldn't help but get in the whole loop on how to cheat with getting models and textures in too, but tbh with the new ent_create instructions we can have our primitive shapes so i think i'm pretty much covered with that.. And as for sound effects and music, maybe try to procedurally create some midi files?
So.. here's my ideas.. Feel free to nick them if you like, since i don't think I'll have the time to do all, if any of them.. But I'll certainly try, once I'm done with Intense X Copper 1.0.
1) Lines 2
Continue on my lines game, but this time add weapons and power ups to make it less boring
2) Inverse Kinematics
Use primitive boxes to assemble a robot arm and make it move using real IK code. Not the most entertaining game, but I figured one could copy paste the small IK function and use it for his game. The function itself is a very optimized real IK code and the algorithm was given to me in my robotics class back in uni. To be honest, I couldn't quite figure out the physics myself, but I could still translate it to code and make a demo out of it. The pic is from my Ogre 3d implementation. If you're in a hurry, I uploaded my assignment report (21mb) which included full source code, screens and explanations for whomever might be interested.
3) procedural creatures
I'll probably won't be doing this one, so feel free to give it a go if that sort of stuff tickles your fancy. It's like a poor man's spore game. You let the user put together a creature using boxes, spheres, and being able to connect them together.. You now apply physics to it (ODE I guess) and use your preferred method (i'd use GAs and NNs) to train your creatures to walk (crawl, hop, or whatever), so they can move to the finish line (so i guess they'd just walk in a straight line from point A to point B) as fast as possible. This project would probably be ridiculously hard and not worth the contest prizes:/ Video is from the game Sumotori, which kinda resembles my idea.. It's 87kb big, so google it and give it a try, the game is hilarious...
4) Speech recognition
Or something like that.. I mean this contest screams for games or applications that don't need any graphics at all. Another idea would be a chat bot, that you can make basic conversations with.. Again, I'm probably just way over my head.. Pic is from the Eliza bot
5) Atoms game
Ever played this atari ST classic? Very cute game, which could easily be done with sphere primitives, and the AI for it would be an interesting challenge. Here's a link to an online version of it.
6) Gamestudio Crayons
I left the best one (and probably the hardest too) for last.. Have you ever played this awesome game? Maybe, if I could find (because I suck at physics to actually create one) an open sourced 2d physics plugin that I could use with A7, I could give this one a go.. If I do find one, the rest will be really easy.
And a question.. If I were to make one of these games, which one would win your vote?
