I'd like to announce the 1st annual Halloween-hack.

Rules:
- The entry must use the allegro / allegroGL game lib
- The entry should have a Halloween feel. Make it spooky, creepy and scary
- All entries must be finished on October 28th
- Source code must be supplied

How to submit an entry:

The preferred way to submit an entry is by sending me a link to your entry via PM.
If you don't have online webspace, just drop me a PM and I'll give you an email address you can send the entry to.

I'll then prepare a website and put all entries on that website.

Voting will take place after Halloween.

So.. start coding!

can i cover my tetris-clone blocks in blood, and submit that

Spellcaster...

what type of game are you looking for? Any type? Can the game I am currently making count... If I redraw all the bmps to make them spooky?

Sure (to both of you)

While I'd prefer if you guys would start a new game, using an existing one is ok as well. I'll put a submission form online later this month in which you can state stuff like "project started:" and other stuff of interest.

And as always, this is a "fun challenge"... so just have fun and don't worry too much on the rules

Sweet
Something new to tickle my brain with.

If I had time, I'd do a Forbidden Forest remake.

Annual! That's more than I expected
I have not yet entered any compo and I don't think I'm ready yet.

But if I would join this one, I'd do a Ghosts'n'Goblins Game.

A J: I'd love to see a bloody Tetris game

OOh, I'm in. I suppose we have from midnight, Sep 30 to Midnight, Oct 28?

Spooky, creepy, and scary? I don't know, spell, that could be tricky... but I'll give it a shot... (maybe)

Sounds like fun. I'm in.

Cool!! I'll try something! I have some good idea's.

Paul Pridham: whats this forbiden forest game you're talking about? Do you have an original?

Denny.

Hmmm..I'd love to do a game, but I have no time to do it.

I think somebody should do a game version of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacure" (except change "Massacure" to "Slaughter" for law issues).

Starting now? This isn't an 8 hour thing?

Nope. If it were, I couldn't participate now

I'm not going to begin for a few days, most likely. Rather busy.

Cool I had an idea, but it wasn't an 8-hour thing. I should get cracking ...

So if I get this right, we have the entire month to do this?

In that case: Count (Dracula) me in!

Heh, I'm hoping to unveil a demo of my LTLN Engine (built on LScript) for this
I'm thinking a nice platformer for this one... Sort of a horror-style metroid

You don't need to do a "horror" game. you can also give existing ideas a new twist. Like making pacman ghosts really scary

Or "Bust-a-Move" with skulls... it's up to you...
You could also just use my programmers art - which really is scary

Just have fun.

No can do for me. I'm still messing with Win32API/C++/DX/WinSock/etc. Plus Tony Hawk Underground is being released 10-28 this month:(.

But we do have the entire month to code our entries, right? I don't have much time at the end of this month, but I have a (tiny) bit of spare time this week and the next...
(gotta love those 0800-21.30 days!)

An idea including zombies struck me when I got home yesterday, so now I've started a project.
I wonder how far I'll get...
I'm thinking of making it funny rather than creepy though.

Uhm.. I was just thinking.
Is there an official webpage for this, and how do we submit our entries?

Limitations on entry sizes?
Any other limitations we should note?

(..this doesn't seem too organized, but it seems like fun )

[edit]
Derezo, read the original post. Moron.

Not yet, working on it.

Nope.

Nope.

You got the idea.

I'd like to recommend everyone to do what you can to reduce the size of your entry, use datafiles.

Get that website up. TINS already has one, and that compo goes off in november.

Currently I'm using uncompressed bitmaps.
I'm not going to worry about size until I get the engine working good (that's why I asked. If there was a size requirement, I would need to focus on that from the beginning ). It's currently only 172kb zipped up, anyway, so I might not use datafiles at all if it's less than 1mb at the end.

What about PNGs? IIRC they're gzip compressed, may compress even better than Allegro's datafiles, maybe depending on if you use global compression or not. And about downloading time, the final product is zipped anyways. In any case, I bet everyone will be able to fit their entries in a single forum attachment...

Could you guys help me out a bit? I realise I could always make a game featuring a witch and some bats but I would rather like to know more about Halloween. You see, it is very much an Anglo-Saxon tradition, overhere (Netherlands) at that date (Allerheiligen/Allerzielen) people go visit the graves of deceased familymembers and tend to their graves but that's it. No other traditional activities.
I guess the word Halloween originated from Hallow e'en = Holy Evening or rather Eve of a Holy Day. Furthermore I gather that it is a night when the boundaries between the world of the living and the world of the dead are very weak but that is about it.
Please enlighten this poor halloween-newb

&*@#%#$^*(! I clicked on spell check and the damn thing went and timed out on me... erased my submission when I clicked on 'back'... why has this been happening so often lately?

Anyway, in North America, we don't treat Halloween in any sort of religious or spiritual or mystic way. We don't pay respect to the dead on this day. It's mostly a candy-related tradition here.

Children dress up in costumes, which range from ghosts, witches, monsters, politicians, fruit, giant rolls of toilet paper... pretty much anything, though usually it's 'scary'. They go from door to door down the street, and when the door is opened they yell "Trick or Treat!" This means "Give me a treat or I'll pull a trick on you," but most kids probably never make the connection, although some will egg your house if you give them no treats, or if they're not very good treats. Households will buy candy specifically to hand it out on this occasion. Probably about 95% of children under 13 will participate in Halloween traditions.

Halloween, for some, is also a night for scaring younger kids, stealing their candy, and causing general mischief/vandalisation.

Also, sometimes we bob for apples, which involves floating apples in a vat of water and trying to retrieve them using only your teeth, but obviously this isn't as fun as getting free candy.

Oh, and people put out jack-o-lanterns and skeletons and lights and gravestones and stuff for decorations.

Wow... I've never heard Halloween decribed in such detail and technical terms. Also, Halloween is a chance for some peopole (my dad) to try to scare as many people as possible (he's even gotten me on occasion, and I grew up with him). It's really mischevious, as Goodbytes said some people will throw eggs at houses that didn't give them candy, however, some people will throw eggs at houses simply to be mischevous. Also, some people smash pumpkins (the jack-o-lanterns that other people carve). I don't know what else to tell yah.

Make your game scary... if at all possible

Halloween has become all about candy. Children get very excited going from door to door getting candy. Some even start very early and go on through the night with garbage bags of candy (the hefty kind). Some go to one house, then change their costume a little and go back to the same house. Ahhh, chidhood.

The candy factories start selling their halloween specialty candy packs 2 or 3 months before halloween. It's insane. They know that everyone will be bying candy's cause they don't want to get their houses egged.

Denny

I always thought the word Halloween meant All Hallow's Eve, but what that means I assume it was some black magic sort of day...

"Dubble bubble, toil and trouble, fire burn, and cauldron bubble. Cool it in baboon's blood; then the charm is firm and good..."

Yes, once, for a parody play, I memorized that last stanza... I forgot the last four lines, though...

The play was titled "MacBooth", and had to do with MacBeth and Aberaham Lincoln's assassination. But that's off topic...

Just a little

Yea... Not like Christmas doesn't make companies do that or anything. A week ago, my mom came home with Christmas stuff

I thought what you said except for the Black Magic thing, someone's been watching too many Disney movies , but his makes sense too...

No...... This is like.... *this = ~Disney;

Halloween has never meant 'scary' to me. It's always meant 'supernatural made fun and comical'. Casper the Friendly Ghost is a good example of this. I don't like the idea of 'Trick or Treat' much - it's just a form of blackmail. For me, a good Halloween would probably involve going to some kind of fancy-dress party (or at my age maybe helping organise one for kids), playing spooky-made-comical music, and having a good time. The idea is probably nicer than such an event would be in practice. But that's just me - maybe I'm alone in this.

I can't enter this year, since I'll be starting a project soon for my course here at uni. But if the competition runs again next year, I may well have time to enter. Thou shalt PHEAR my entry

Most kids don't even bother saying "Trick or Treat" anymore. They just ring the doorbell, open their paper bag/pillowcase/backpack, and expect you to put some candy into it. And just forget about hearing a thank-you if the kid's older than 13. That said, I've also never seen anyone's house get egged either, so maybe everyone's just getting really apathetic about Halloween in general (except the candy companies).

As for the competition, I'd modify Empire Allegro for it, but I'm already too busy working on adding some decent AI to it.

Regarding Halloween hack:

I'll put a website online this wek. All guidelines / rules will be on it. I decided to allow people to enter in different categories:

** The Halloween Edition Game **
Take any existing game idea and give it a creepy touch. What if the Monsters had invented Tetris? The Addams wrote Zelda?

** The B-Movie Retro Feel Game **
Create a game that tries to get close to the typical classical B-Horror-Movie feeling. Think Tarantula, Mummy, Nosferatu etc. The game must be monochrome.

** Everything goes **
Create a game with a halloween / horror feeling. It's up to you to define the details.

Extras:
- Style Points are given if there's a helper named "Igor"
- Style points are given for voice-overs
- Style points are given for references to other classical horror movies or horror games

These categories should not limit you, but give you some strating ideas... that's why there is the "Everything Goes" category.

I'm dumb!, thanks SC, now I know what to call the useless tip creature in my platformer
If I ever get that far...

Thank all for your information. If I can't find a better idea I can always make a game about scaring away the neighbourhood kids before they take all your candy and in the meanwhile preventing them from egg-ing your house
Are teams allowed? I just might talk Amarillion into joining me.

If teams are allowed, I may be willing to write .mid or .it music for someone. So post if you need music, and say what kind, and I'll consider it

What exactly do you mean, spellcaster, by 'voiceover'? Would, say, reading the title of the game in a scary voice constitute a voice-over? And, when you say "references" to classical horror movies or games, does this include spoofing? Finally, are style points awarded "binary," that is, you either get them or you don't, or, if I do my whole game in voice-over, will I get more style points than someone who just has his/her title read in a scary voice?

[edit] Oh, and can we submit more than one entry?

Sure. Same if a voice says "Another visitor. Stay a while - stay forever!"

When someone playing the game will get your reference (say because your main enemy is a Vampire Lemming with bad AI, your doors open with a star-trek like "swoosh" or because ini the background is a giant tarantula) it's a reference.

Regarding style: These style points are used to increase your maximum style points.

Say you have the normal speedhack like 1-5 range. For each of the areas you can get a bonus to your max points. So, if you have references and voice overs you get +2 to your possible max points.
So you can get 1-7 points for style.

Sure.

What about the style points for the most scariest code?

I LOVE horror games and I've been wanting to write a Resident Evil type game for a while now, so this seems like the perfect excuse to start coding it

I hope I can finish it in time!

That would be the "pure allegro compo" then

Teams are allowed right? I'm in together with Lambik.

This is cool! I don't care about winning or losing. I'm in! My first ever allegro comp! I had this idea ages ago, for a horror twist on a well known game. I made some art and that's about it. But now I've got a good excuse to start coding it!

Now, where's that pixel art gone...

Are other libs allowed? (Alogg, Jgpalleg? I'm using both).

Sure. But if you use them state that, make sure your makefiles handles those libs well and consider to provide the link to the respective download sites as well (and to any other libs needed).
So, if you use PNGs make sure to provide a link to both libPNG and Zlib (and the allegro wrapper, if you use one).

In other words: use what you want, but make it as easy as you can for others to compile your source. Yes, this adds some work on your side