Do it. This thing is a heck of a lot of fun and can be a great learning experience to anyone who gets involved. There's plenty of non-gaming "three hour" type competitions out there (solve all of these problems type things, mostly) so I don't see any reason why this shouldn't go over well.

I'd definitely do another one [smile]

I agree. This is the first time I've entered the contest. I learned a lot about what it takes to make a game in 3 hours. I'm confident I can do a lot better next time (also I won't have written the engine base code the night before). I'd do it again in a heartbeat.

Another agreeing post - first time entering & this is the first game I've "finished" in a very long time.

I think if you want to get commercial sponsorship though, the time issue needs some work. Someone posted in the IV thread about their system at uni that starts a timer from when you first look at an exam until you finish & submit it. That sounds like a really good idea - if a similar system could be worked out rather than having a single deadline many more people would be able to enter over the course of a couple of days to a week.

When enough competitions have finished, how about having an open vote on the best game of them all?

Props for running this competition in the first place, bonus pretzels for that.

Yeah, i agree on the idea to make it "more" official and also do it regularely.

Also, i more sophisticated concentration on a page with upload, blog of entrants, results page and, actually pretty important, a time script that tells the exact start and end time in the entrants time zone.

This is of course a rather big workload to get done. I wouldn't mind having no prizes at all, but i guess having a sponsor would increase throughput as well.

It's a real great opportunity to brush up on self-management skills and concentrating on the game itself. I'd also like to have the durance really fixed to 3h. IMHO the Ludum Dare competition which started with 24h got a little too long with 48h hours. For someone with real life duties like family and/or job 3h is a chunk of life that can be snuck out, but a whole weekend is a little more difficult to defend :)

I've got some webspace with PHP and MySQL available. Anyone want to help out?

Would if I knew how. Well I know SQL inside out and I've fiddled with ASP and looked at some PHP code...
But I continue to think having GD involved to make it more official is a great idea. For instance the GD contests page should feature the 3H-GDC contests somehow.

The fact that it's only 3 hours means I'd like to see this contest run regularly and quite frequently - every month would suit me although the judging takes time so maybe bi-monthly would be best.

I'd also like to see a contest that logically extends to being maybe a 5/6H-GDC - longer than that and many will lose the ability to actually use all the hours, but a 6 hour contest would let us make some much better games. If GD was more involved then maybe a 3/6 hour cycle could be implemented or something...

I'd definitely love to do this again.