TINS will be held this year Friday August 29 to Monday September 1. The official TINS '08 site is now online, go and register now!

What is TINS?

TINS is a speedhack-like competition where you have to write a game within a single weekend (72 hours), from scratch, using Allegro. To prevent cheating, some special, random restrictions will be generated and announced just before the start (e.g. last year's rules). During the weekend, all entrants maintain a log (e.g. last year's log) so you can see all the activity live. It's a good way to learn a lot about game programming in a short time.

Go check out the site and register

Shame I don't know if I'll have a time. But I surely will sign in if I manage to find time.

Well you know, it's summer, everybody is out.

gnolam: TINS is not Speedhack.

I wish it were earlier. I hope I can participate.

On the site, the "about me" box, all formatting is stripped. Kind of annoying, but I suppose understandable. I don't know if you want to do anything about that or not.

It's on my list to add support for a.cc-style markup tags, but it might take some time before I get around to implementing that properly. So don't hold your breath for it.

You might have better luck with speedhack, it should be fairly soon after TINS (Probably October)

I must admit i've always wanted to do one of these things but have been too busy. My excuse this year.. I'm moving places and already have parties scheduled from the wednesday to tuesday that weekend.

TINS is up? Yay, it's been a long time! When was my last post here?
Anyway, no time for nostalgia. In the unlikely case I'll be free that weekend, I'm considering joining the competition myself, besides helping other people with graphics and music. In order to do that, I'll need a slave programmer to do the dirty work for me. Anyone willing to submit?

[edit]
Oh, how do the rules work in TINS? Are they suggested like in speedhack, or are they dictated?

Not sure, a bit of both? I don't have a fancy online rule database like Matthew, but most rules that I have in my list were suggested here on the forums of a.cc. I have hundreds of different rules in my collection, from which a few will be picked randomly by a little perl script. Maybe I'll start another rule suggestion thread in a few weeks. I can always use more rules.

The reason is simple: I was too busy at work during spring. TINS isn't always at the same time of the year (neither is Speedhack)

Hmmm, hopefully I'll be free the weekend of the 29th, I don't really plan that far ahead, so...

I'm considering to join. I've never entered TINS (or Speedhack). Depending on the rules I may or may not be able to submit an entry, but if I don't enter now...

I've read the FAQ and still I have to ask about the code reuse. Of course fair-game is the only thing that prevents someone from cheating. Then, I have some code here and there that might help, but it is a real mess. Even if I upload it, I doubt anyone might find it useful. Should I really, absolutely need to upload it?.

As I said, there were reasons. Well if I think about it again I realised that both are moving, but I don't remember that they were both this close. Anyway this is just academical discussion (I was asking/commenting out of curiosity).

Yes, that's right, two or three years ago it was happening during august. And now it will be held in october (or between september and october) IIRC.

Cool. So I can suggest some rules if I want to it's just that there's a rather small chance that they will be picked.

I think a poll system is more fun, though! Because even if everyone has shockingly contrastive tastes, the chance they will be satisfied with the rules is bigger than if those were picked randomly. How difficult would it be to pull out a basic poll system? I would offer to try if I still remembered much about coding...

And again, because I don't remember my C and I want to make my "offer" clear: I'm joining this year's competition myself, but I can't write code. So I'm hoping that someone pops up to do the code for me, which means getting the graphics and music and just needing to focus on the code. I know it usually works the other way 'round, with programmers doing everything and getting support from artists, but I like doing things the wrong way and I wanted to have my own game idea this time. It doesn't actually change much in the end... anyone up for the challenge?

Oh, and this time too, if I get the chance, I'll try to help other people lacking music and graphics. Just be sure to post/log on IRC!

{"name":"e_to_the_pi_minus_pi.png","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/f\/4\/f4636ba63c20c22c23b9ea5f28a04eb9.png","w":700,"h":264,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/f\/4\/f4636ba63c20c22c23b9ea5f28a04eb9"}
(link)