Qbasicnews.com

One Key Challenge lasted from 22.10. till 28.11. The goal was to create a game with one control key in QBasic. You can check for more detailed rules in here: http://forum.qbasicnews.com/viewtopic.php?t=4167

Totaly 7 entries were sumbitted.

By alphabetical order:

Title: Cannons
Author: red_Marvin
Screenshot: 1,2
Short discription: Scorched Earth clone featuring an option of adding custom made terrain graphic. No AI.
Download: http://www.samods.com/~lachie/onekeyc/cannons.zip

Title: Falling Starz
Author: James Kinney(aka mech1031)
Screenshot: 1
Short discription: Monochrome, space ship, asteroid shooter.
Download: http://www.samods.com/~lachie/onekeyc/fstars.zip

Title: Free Fall
Author: RST
Screenshot: 1,2
Short discription: Vertical scroller with a space ship.
Download: http://www.samods.com/~lachie/onekeyc/FFall.zip

Title: Fundee
Author: adosorken(aka Necrophidius)
Screenshot: 1,2
Short discription: Shooting game with running stickmen and tomatoes.
Download: http://www.samods.com/~lachie/onekeyc/fundee.zip

Title: Red Jumpy Ball
Author: Ryan
Screenshot: 1
Short discription: One screen, level based, arcade platform game.
Download: http://www.samods.com/~lachie/onekeyc/rjb.zip

Title: Tanks
Author: potato
Screenshot: 1
Short discription: Top view, one screen, arcade game with tanks.
Download: http://www.samods.com/~lachie/onekeyc/tanks.zip

Title: The Man Who Had A Boat
Author: Lachie Dazdarian
Screenshot: 1,2
Short discription: Arcade game with a boat featuring 3 levels.
Download: http://www.samods.com/~lachie/onekeyc/boat.zip

You can download ALL the entries here: http://www.samods.com/~lachie/onekeyc/onekeyentries.zip


Tanks is updated from the last available version by me. I added a menu and a small readme file. I also compiled Falling Starz and I added a speed reducer. Don't know how it really works. Original source codes for both games are still there. Rest of the entries are untouched.

Please check the entries and cast you vote. Poll will be opened for 12 days!

Instructions for evaluation:
The most important thing you should pay attention to is the gameplay. Simply, how fun is to play the game. How good balanced is the challenge. The replay value.

Second most important thing is the cleverness and ingeniously in creation of a concept that works great with one control key. I'm not putting this on the first place since a good idea doesn't have to be very well executed and may result in a bad game. Still this is something you should have in mind.

Third element is technical perfection of the game which influences on the gameplay quite a lot. If the game is difficult to play because keyboard handler sucks or collision is bad you probably won't enjoy playing it. Technical perfections also includes flicker or no flicker, menu accessibility, presence of bugs, stuff like ability do try again if you lose the game and similar.

Fourth is the graphic. An important element but should not be crucial for this challenge due the time limit and gameplay restriction.

The rest is game design, sound, music, documentation, story, and anything you can think of.

These are just the guidelines. Vote whatever you like. What is most important is that you don't have to be able to check all the entries in order to vote. Incompatibility is the problem of the author. Still, if you have problems running a certain entry check it's documentation if one exist. It might be helpful.

Please post comments on the entries to keep it more interesting. I'll post mine later. I don't think it would be ok to do that in the first post.

Thank you for participating.

Falling Stars obviously doesn't have much in the way of graphics, but I loved it. Everyone else: vote for Free Fall.

This is a tough vote...a few of them really do stand out.

Tough choice indeed! I actually consider them all equally fun because they're one button games (DAMMIT!).

I didn't think it was that hard to decide.

Am I the only loser who didn't vote for his own game ...but you have to admint, the man who had a boat kicked-ass

Free Fall - Didn't liked it on the first ball. On the begining I wrestled with controls before I realised that I need to PRESS space repeatetly not HOLD it to make any serious progress in the game. Played it several times and reached level 5. It has a certain replay and nice challenge value. To bad that graphic, except for the main ship, is not more interesting. Very disappointed it only got one vote so far. Maybe people are playing it wrong(holding the space). You probably now know how casted that vote. :wink:

BTW, RST. How many levels it features and did you drawed the ship sprite? It's really neat.


Tanks - Initialy I didn't thought this could be something interesting.
I found the concept unplayable. Game was also basicly a working code, so to make a real game out of it a menu had to be added. Since the game exited every time a round ended all variables were just dumped so with a menu I had to reinitialize variables carefully before every round. I also had quite few prolems getting the menu working. Simply said, sloppy code. Not so begginerish as sloppy. Anyway, with a menu it's a nice little game. While working on the code I realized that the concept is quite fun to play and potential. It could work very well with progressive levels.


Falling Starz - Good concept but like I said before, very technicaly imperfect game. It's very close to unplayable. Collision is quite poor. Not to mention the flicker and lack or screen refreshing. With a better code I would be something nice. Liked the monochrome graphic. Two votes this early is a surprise. I find it completely unplayable. Maybe I'm being too harsh. But you must understand. I have my favorites.

Cannons - Very nice entry. I really liked the code and the way one key restriction was used. Game could use some animation. Custom tilesets are a cool feature. To bad no AI was implemented. That's a real downer.

Green Jump Ball - Couldn't play it. Too bad. From other people comments, it seems to be very playable. What I can comment is the graphic. I just don't like how the background and tiles were combined.

Fundee - Wasn't able to play it properly. But it's obvius that Fundee features very well designed and executed graphic. I have no doubt that gameplay is on the level too.

And people, stop voting for me. I so don't want to win this challenge. It would be really silly for me to write my own name on the prize I drawed for the challenge I organized. I didn't wanted to leave my entry out of competeition since it would be patronizing to others who participated.

Ah, never mind.

Hehe Lachie dude...your game is actually really nice. I loved the graphics in it. You always make nice eye-candy.

Fundee needs a pretty fast computer (probably a 200MHz or better) to play properly because of the amount of data it moves per frame. If I had more time to develop it, I would have implemented a scheme to only update what needed updating, but time constraints didn't allow me that luxury.

I thought the jumping ball game was very original but a little hard

I also found Falling Starz to be a bit unplayable. Great concept and with more time it could be developed into a kickass game.

Lachie: I am having such a difficult time choosing a game, there are so many which are very good. I think I will have to play more in order to make a good decision. Excellent compo.

lol Green Jump Ball. Did it still not work in 640x480 mode? Found that fixed some problems with an RPG I was working on a while back as well.