New to this year's competition is an online Rule-O-Matic. The more people that participate in this, the better.

http://www.speedhack.allegro.cc/

You'll notice there is a new Rule-O-Matic section. You can add rules and rate other people's rules. This will help determine which rules will govern the 2005 competition. Once there are a number of rules entered, I'll add a "Spin the Rule-O-Matic" page where you can see a sample, generated ruleset.

This is the best rule. All right thinking programmers will vote for it.

I've added over fifty rules to get the thing primed. Most of them have come from earlier SpeedHacks and suggestions in previous threads.

Registration for the SpeedHack will be begin within a few days. I'm going to make it a requirement that before you can register, you first have to add a few of your own rules and rate a handful of others. This is to encourage more participation, and hopefully get rules that people will enjoy.

If you happen to notice one of your rules gets deleted, don't re-add it. It most likely means that it was a duplicate of an earlier rule.

I make mention of this on the Add Rule page, but just to make sure people understand what the categories mean:

• Genre - restricts the type of game, theme, environment, or major goals. Things like Action, Role Playing, Outer Space, and Save a Princess to Win are all considered genres for the purposes of the competition.

• Technical - something specific that must be included within the confines of the Genre. It might be something like "Mouse must be used for gameplay" or "You must fight a troll."

• Artistic - a more liberal rule that is open to interpretation or something dealing with with visuals and audio styles. Some examples include: Ambient Noises, something must Mutate, implement the Four Seasons.

• Bonus - a for-fun rule that isn't necessarily game play related. The traditional bonus rule is Act of Dog, where you can opt out of a rule. Feel free to suggest such things like "Drink no caffeine," but it's best if it's something that others can see.

As always, the spirit of this competition is to have fun. Getting worked up over the rules isn't worth it! They are there to just add some craziness to the atmosphere and hopefully provide some inspiration.

The game should contain no text.....::)
The game should be feminine.........::)
The game should be set in a bag of chips.....::)

Done.

I voted that one Good. It's really cool, actually. Imagine dialogue which consists entirely of speech bubbles with symbolic representations in them. Would be an interesting challenge.

It would eliminate the "Internationalization(mininum 2 languages supported) Rule", so the spinning should make sure that these two rules could not be in at the same time.

I rated everything I could, added some of my own. Most of the rules that were already there were good enough, but I rated most of those I remembered from previous Speedhacks "bad". I don't think I want repetition.

That reminded me of a game called Live-a-Live by... by Square, I think. One of the chapters was set in prehistoric times, and the method of communication was identical to that you described. It was done perfectly and many "conversations" held in picture language made me laugh.

I'm sure that exact rule would produce many interesting entries.

Hm, is there a way to re-rate a rule I think I accidently mis-rated?

Rated all rules and added a new one but i don't know if i'll be able to enter the contest.

Hah. We should have a contest which has as many of the rules as possible and the goal is to come up with a game idea that works.

Marcello

Not at all, if there's no text in the game all the languages in the world are automatically supported. Though, the intern... rule would be rather useless, it doesn't make them incompatible.

With the exception of Bonus Rules, previously used rules won't be recycled.

No. In the big picture, a couple mistaken ratings won't hurt. I wanted to keep the interface as simple as possible.

Some of the links are still from last year (participants & download link), but the Rule-O-Matic links should be visible and working. I'd try clearing the browser's cache.