Amiga Christmas Tree

Seasons Greetings! In the spirit of Christmas, and due to the previous year's success we are hosting the Second Annual Festive Amiga Game Making Competition!

This year the competition is very much the same as it was last year, except you now have three full weeks to work on your game rather than two. Remember we had seven playable entries made within the time limit last year, so don't doubt yourselves about being able to get something basic produced before Christmas, you can do it! I believe in you!

If you want to look at screenshots of last year's entries for the 2009 competition for ideas and inspiration then check out the 2009 Amiga Christmas Games Competition voting page.

Competition Rules

1. You have until December 24th to finish your entry, that gives you a full three weeks from the starting date. If your game isn't finished by Christmas Eve, upload what you have finished so far anyway, just try to make sure it's playable.
2. Your game must run on a classic OCS or AGA Amiga. This way, anyone should be able to play all the games, either on their old hardware or through UAE. Unfortunately OS4, Aros and MorphOS specific entries at this stage wouldn't reach enough people and couldn't compete for votes.
3. You can create your game with any software you like. This includes programming it yourself too. If you have no coding knowledge, feel free to use any of the available game making software such as Backbone, SEUCK, GRAC, GRAAL, Reality, Game Engine, or anything else you can find.
4. Your game must be themed around Christmas or the festive season. It doesn't necessarily have to contain religious references, but it must be identifiable. Try to make something you or a child you know would enjoy playing during the holidays.

That's all there is to the rules! I hope everyone has a happy festive season and that we get some fabulous new Amiga games to play again this year. If you have any questions about the rules or the competition, feel free to e-mail me at arcadecammy at gmail.com

How to submit your final entry

All entries should be provided as either an LHA archive that can be extracted and run from Workbench, or as an ADF file that can be written back to floppy or run in an emulator. A burnable ISO image for CDTV or CD32 would be fine too. Please provide a ReadMe file with your entry to explain what the game is about and how you made it, this should help people make a fair choice when voting for the games. If you have used any ripped graphics, sound or music please credit your sources, and let us know which language or game maker you used to create the game.

I recommend everyone to upload their game to Aminet, mentioning the contest and the URL for the Amiga Christmas Tree website in their ReadMe file, since you will definitely reach a larger audience there, but it would also be advisable to find an alternative place to upload your file or e-mail your entry to me to arcadecammy@gmail.com in case it doesn't appear on Aminet soon enough.

All the entries should be finished by Midnight GMT on the 24th December, this way they should be available to download from here some time in the late morning in New Zealand, Australia and Japan, with plenty of time for the rest of the world to wake up to the presents under the tree. Once all the entries are submitted, I'll add the links so it will all be ready for people to download and play by Christmas Day.

Prize List

At the moment the prizes you could win are:

Stock A90% included in the First Prize donated by JJ with postage costs covered by Franko
CD32 Arcade Joystick donated by FeriX
Two PS2 to Amiga adapters donated by FeriX
Box of Amiga software including OS 3.5, OS 3.9 and CygnusEd donated by Belxjander

Useful Game Development Resources

Game making programs with point and click GUI

Backbone - Easily build your own platform games and overhead multi-directional shooters.

The full Backbone game making package
Final update for Backbone
Free keyfile to unlock all Backbone's features

GRaphic Adventure Creator and GRaphic Adventure Authoring Language - Create your own Point & Click Adventure games.

Full GRAC 2 package
Extras for GRAC 2
Intro creator for GRAC 2
GRAAL 2.3 A
GRAAL 2.3 B
GRAAL 2.3 C
GRAAL 2.3 D

3D Game Creator - Create your own three dimensional game worlds.

3D Game Creator

Graphics and Music Resources

Spriters Resource
Background HQ
Christmas sprites for platform/horizontal shooter game
Some Christmas mod music to use in your game
Pixel Joint - Pixel Art Community

This website is still under construction but I'm doing my best to get it ready as soon as possible!

Check out the previous two Amiga Christmas Tree websites:
Amiga Christmas Tree 2009
Amiga Christmas Tree 2008