You like antiquity. You like games. You fancy yourself as a bit of a decent game-maker. Maybe you made a scenario for Civ IV or Caesar IV. Here, then, is a competition for you:

And so here it is: the briefly awaited, second ever, YoYo Games competition! Riding hot on the heels of our very successful Winter Competition, we’re hoping to see a crop of games to match the exceptional standard set in that contest.

The Theme

Ancient Civilization! Not just the Romans, Greeks, and Egyptians, but also the Mayans, Aztecs, Vikings, and Celts (to name but a few). So many lands, empires, city states, peoples, cultures, beliefs, and symbols. So much food for your fertile imaginations.

As with the winter theme we’ve kept the constraints on competition games deliberately low, hopefully this will result in even more really creative games.

The games will be judged on creativity, originality, aesthetics, and game mechanics. With marks, as usual, for the best implementation of the theme.

A word of warning, we’re looking for fun games to play, not epics – if you feel your game’s strongest asset is its incredibly long and developed plot-line it most likely will not do well in this competition, be sure your games are fun to play from the outset. For the committed entrant the IGDA casual gaming 2006 white paper has an interesting (but long) analysis of what a good casual game should be (pdf).

Judging will be conducted by YoYo Games and Prof. Overmars. As with the last competition the community response will be taken into account when we come to judge the games (with special weighting given to play count and number of Diggs).

So even if you don’t enter the competition yourself, you can still contribute by trying out the games. However, we do ask that the entrants themselves do not rate competition games (on pain of disqualification!).

We’ve giving the developers a bit longer this time round; the contest will end on April 27th, 2008.

The Prizes!

The Winner	$1000
Second	$500
Third	$250

*All prize amounts are US Dollars

The winning games will be announced by early May, 2008.

How to Enter

First, check out the rules. You don’t want to submit a game that can’t win. No copyright infringement!

Then get the Game Maker software (if you don’t already have it), and start programming.

Feel free to visit the GameMaker Community forums if you need a bit of support.

Once you’re done upload your game to the site, be sure to tag the game with “Competition02“.

Finally post on the competitions page of the YYG forum to let us, and everyone else, know your game is up.