Seasons greetings, one and all! Well, it's approaching that time of year again when we put our personal lives on hold and ignore our health as we rekindle our imaginations and use our skills and talents to create exciting new games to enter into the traditional Festive Amiga Game Making Competition. While in previous years the focus of the competition was on producing games for original Amiga hardware only, this year we are including two categories: Classic Amiga and Next Generation Amiga. The NG category includes games made for AmigaOS4, MorphOS, Aros or RTG OS3 systems. The Classic category requires the game to run on at least an Amiga 1200 with extra RAM or an accelerator. If it requires a 060 and a graphics card, it'll go in the NG category. Also this year we will have a panel of experienced judges who will play and rate the games, and then combine and tally the results to find our two major prize winners. Games will be rated on the usual aspects of gameplay, graphics, sound, but also on originality, good use of the hardware, or anything else that clearly shows the effort that has gone into making the game.

The rules for this year's competition are different to the two previous years, where the goal was to produce a Christmas, Winter or Holiday-themed game. This time we thought we'd try something a bit more fun, giving people a chance to try something they may have wanted to make for a while but never got around to it.

Remember back to when you were younger. Christmas time was when all the publishers would rush their development teams to get their games on the shelves, and often the big sellers at this time of year were adaptions of the latest silverscreen blockbuster. What if you were one of those game developers, and it was up to you to create an adaption of a popular franchise intended to be the number one seller at Christmas time? How would you do it?

This year's Festive Amiga Game Making Competition's rule is this: Create an Amiga game adaption of the film, television or book franchise of your choice! The only exception is you cannot make a game based on something that was already made into an Amiga game. Also, please let us know in the thread what you are going to base your game on so hopefully others can choose something different. If you are unsure if there already is an Amiga game of the series you're considering, please check the Hall of Light - http://hol.abime.net

Think about all the brilliant games we got that would never have been if it weren't for a movie or a comic book being popular enough for an adaption. But also remember the awful games based on series which should never have had games made about them at all, and try not to make the same mistake.

You will have two months to produce something, and it doesn't have to be a full game. It can be a single level, or an incomplete game, but make sure it is at least playable, and of course more complete games will probably be rated higher. On December 24th you should upload what you have completed so far of your game to an online host where we can download it from and re-host it on the Amiga Christmas Tree website (where the competition details will also be hosted).

You can use any language or tools you like to create your game. This includes programming and compiling your own code, designing it with a GUI-based game-editor tool, or even producing it in some multimedia presentation software, as long as it can be run from an icon, CLI or booted from a disk.

Details on the prizes for each of the categories will follow. We'd appreciate any donations to the prize pool, and remember the more tempting the prizes the more likely our talented community is to come up with something fun for us and our families and friends to enjoy this holiday season.

Thanks for reading, everyone, and good luck to anyone interested in entering. I hope you like the theme, I think most of us could think of a story we enjoyed that we thought could be made into a game. If you have any questions, please ask.

Have fun!

AMIGA RULEZ!

I forgot to mention that people are allowed to team up, so if you're good with graphics ask around for a programmer and submit a game as a team, it could increase your chances of winning, you'd just have to share the prizes with each other.

I have compiled a list of resources and software that could be helpful with making an Amiga game on my temporary competition page: http://home.exetel.com.au/~amiga/ThirdFestiveComp.html

Good luck to anyone who wants to enter!

Hello everyone. Thank you to those who have taken an interest and made an effort to enter this competition, but I apologise for not having the time to arrange any prizes or promote the competition any more throughout the last month. I feel if I had have had a chance to pay more attention to the competition we could have had a few more entries.

We've decided to extend the end-date of the competition to January 31st, to give anyone who hadn't noticed it before or those who hadn't yet finished a chance to get something entered, and it's a chance for those special guys who already finished their entries to go over them and add a bit more polish if they need to. Final judging will take into account those entries that were completed by the original end-date and bonus points will be awarded. All the rules are still the same, the competition is simply being extended by a month, since this year the entries aren't necessarily Christmas-related so I don't feel too bad about doing this, and the "festive season" continues into January anyway.

I am still working on the Amiga Christmas Tree website, and am updating it every few hours so keep checking back. I haven't had a chance to scour the net for new goodies to put on the page yet, but there's a little bit there, as well as a link to the competition rules page.

Check out http://amigachristmastree.ultimateamiga.co.uk for more details and Amiga goodies as I find them.

Thank you to those who have made an entry for this competition. As there hasn't been much interest in this contest compared to previous years, I'm thinking of extending the competition deadline for another month. I was wondering if that would be enough time for anyone who haven't had a chance until now to join in? It'll give anyone who has already finished their game a chance to polish and finish it off too.

The theme for this current competition is this: Create an Amiga game adaption of the film, television or book franchise of your choice! The only exception is you cannot use the same franchise that has already been made into an Amiga game. If you're not sure, please check either Lemon Amiga or Hall of Light. This competition is open to ALL Amiga platforms too! Bonus points will be awarded to those who completed their games by the original end-date (December 31st).

There's more information about the competition on the Amiga Game-Making Competition Page - [url]http://amigachristmastree.ultimateamiga.co.uk/Competition.html[/url] and don't forget to let me know which franchise you'll be basing your game on!

I know you can do it! Also please don't be afraid to try teaming up, it could only help your chances of winning.