I think with this contest, rather than spewing out an entry, or rushing to get it all done and doing a poor job would get you a worse score than doing part of it right. If all else fails, finish the first two levels and call it a 'Demo'. I'm not GameDev staff, so don't take my word to be 100% correct though.

As for free resources, look here.

Right now I'm soaking up additional artists. Our engine is rather good and the project is very ambitious, but we are in need of character artists. So rather than put together an incomplete project... you could just join my team. ;)

I think your assumption that there will be a lot of incomplete games submitted is a poor one. Game developers work against tight schedules all the time (unfortunately enough) - and when faced with a deadline they won't be able to make, they don't submit an "incomplete" title, but scale back their design until it becomes something managable for the given time frame.

Granted, submitting something without features X, Y, and Z because they've been cut could be regarded as 'incomplete,' but I'm more referring to things that you can tell at a glance are missing rather than things that "it would have been nice to have" - crash bugs, missing textures/models/assets, missing sound, missing frontend or help system, etc. All such things will cost you points - and of course, if you're missing one of your two required elements, you'll get disqualified.

Submitting a 'demo' should be fine as long as it's relatively self-contained (i.e. it finishes gracefully, preferably with some kind of climax, rather than just quitting to the desktop/frontend because it's run out of levels to play). Look at DooM for an example - first episode ends with a bang and a screen of text inviting you to play the next episode.

Quote:Original post by JinJo
How complete a game do you need.

I'd say that would entirely depend on the game itself. With something like pacman or loderunner, I expect little to no story, few different characters, moderate variation in graphics, good action, sound effects, (preferably) an unlimited number of levels, no ending.

With an adventure I expect an introduction (in whatever form), a story, puzzels, a lot of characters to interact with, different graphical scenes, sound that matches the scene, gameplay for about, say 20 to 25 hours, a great ending to conclude the story (with or without an open end to some kind of sequel.)

With the first sample, the thing that matters is action and to a degree variation in gameplay. If you have that, then things like graphics or sound are really not that interesting (though they do add up).
With the second sample, if you have no story, then its already a problem. No puzzels? Well thats not even a game anymore. Great graphics on the other hand are not that big a deal actually. (Take the first Kings or Space Quest adventures for example)

Quote:Original post by JinJo
Would it be enough to just work on say the first 2 levels?

With my first sample: no.
With my second sample: if you can put all those things I just wrote in your game? Yes.

Hope that helps.

I wouldn't consider it cheating. I'd almost say what you're doing is much smarter than what my team is doing just because you can focus on gameplay instead of graphics and programming. Since the competition is about gamplay more than anything, then it might work to your advantage.

Quote:Original post by superpig
I think your assumption that there will be a lot of incomplete games submitted is a poor one. Game developers work against tight schedules all the time (unfortunately enough) - and when faced with a deadline they won't be able to make, they don't submit an "incomplete" title, but scale back their design until it becomes something managable for the given time frame.

True, but there's a difference between teams of 20+ people with skills in different areas compared to, for instance, our team. We are three people with pretty good programming skills, but our artistic skills are very basic (although, luckily, basic modelling isn't THAT difficult) and we don't get paid monthly for working with it nine-to-five. Also, this is somewhat of the first "real" game project we're working on, so our code structure probably isn't too good (compared to commercial titles) despite our best efforts.

I'm guessing most teams here are similiar to our; small and not too experienced with jobs or school taking a lot of time.

Our game has been on hold for a while, but I'm hoping it'll pick up soon. I hope that we'll manage to add some story, that span over three to five levels or something like that. Also, with luck we can add a difficulty changer to add replay value. :)