WINTER 2010 DUALSTREAM DAY OF ZEUX

THE DAY OF ZEUX IS OVER!

GENERAL TOPIC

Isolation

SPECIFIC TOPIC

Alien Invaders

ABOUT THE DAY OF ZEUX

The first official Day of Zeux, hosted by Wondercow, was held in late 1998, under the premise that solo competitors and teams formed beforehand are given a topic and have 24 hours to create a game in MegaZeux from scratch based on the topic. This was based on the earlier Blitzkriegzeux, where games took place in a much shorter period of time and had solo competitors only. The competition was a huge success, and it soon became community tradition to hold them every six months. Variants on the timeframe of the Day of Zeux were also held, including the Weekend of Zeux.

In the summer of 2001, a new twist was added to the Day of Zeux in the form of two separate topics - a general topic, and a specific topic, intended for those who had trouble with ideas. The introduction of this modification created the Dualstream Day of Zeux, and was met with much praise, encouraging future competitions to become Dualstream.

This page will have up-to-date information on the Winter 2010 Dualstream Day of Zeux, which is scheduled to begin on January 2nd, 2010, 17:00:00 GMT and is being hosted by Kuddy.

NEWS

MZX 2.83 is out

December 30th, 2009, 03:17:54 GMT

You can get it at http://mzx.devzero.co.uk/mzx283/ - or click on the link at the top if you don't want to copy and paste it. The judges should be using this version to review the games.

Rule Clarification

November 27th, 2009, 05:41:38 GMT

Just to clarify, since the rules section of this page hasn't been updated yet, the pick your own scoresheet rule introduced in the previous DoZ will also apply to this one. To summarize, you should include in your submission a text file stating which sheet you wish your entry to be scored by. If one is not included, you will be scored using the sheet for the topic you chose, as per usual.

Day of Zeux in Congress!

November 5th, 2009, 16:05:29 GMT

...well, actually, it won't be for about another two months. Though the date hasn't been completely set in stone yet, it's most likely that we will be kicking off 2010 with this DoZ by starting it on January 2. The page is all set up now, at least, so you can go ahead and start signing up.

IRC

When the topics are announced, they're usually announced on IRC first. If you do not have an IRC client, some good options are mIRC and XiRCON for Windows, Ircle for MacOS, and xchat for Linux (there is also a Windows version available). The server you'll want to join is EsperNet. The topic will be announced in #mzx, and in the gamut of outside MZX channels probably as well.

RULES

Teams. Teams will consist of one to three people. If necessary, you may also appoint an alternate member who can take the place of any member of your team should they be unable to attend the Day of Zeux. This alternate member can only be added to your team at the start of the DoZ, before the topics are announced. Signups will be accepted from the time the form goes on the page until the Day of Zeux ends (for obvious reasons, the alternate member field will be removed at go time).

Topics. When the Day of Zeux starts, two topics will be presented: a general topic and a specific topic. These are going to be posted pretty much everywhere - DMZX, IRC, and here on the DoZ site. You may only use one topic as your game's theme. The theme you choose will be important because the themes will have slightly different rules and scoresets. The major difference between the two will be different weights on the "theme" score and disqualification rule. For the general topic, there will be no disqualification due to lack of theme, but a specific-themed game with an average theme score of 5/20 or less will be disqualified.

The topic used by your entry should be clearly labelled on the title screen, in a readme file included with the game, wherever. If the topic of your game is not known, you risk disqualification based on theme.

No anonymity. Each team will receive a number prior to the start of the competition. No anonymity rule will apply during this DoZ. However, the archive file you submit must have a filename that matches your team number. It is, of course, not mandatory that you disclose the name of yourself or your team; if you wish to remain anonymous, that is acceptable.

External Material. All material except music, sound, and the default MZX charsets/palette must be created within the 24 hour period. If any evidence of material such as engines, character sets, palettes, and artwork having been created before the topic announcement is found, your team will be disqualified. Use of external programs such as CharWorks and Palzor during the Day of Zeux is permitted, as long as it is done within the 24 hours.

Game Submission. Your game must be submitted with all necessary files in one or more archives (see the Patch Submission rule below). The archive should be one of these formats: .zip, .rar, .7z, .tar, .tar.gz or .tar.bz2.

If your game is archived in a different format and/or password protected, it may be summarily disqualified.

To help alleviate confusion for the purposes of judging the games, your game should only make use of a single .MZX file, named after your team number (eg. 783454.MZX for team 783454). If you wish to have multiple .MZX files and use 'swap world' to switch between them, these should be clearly labelled as such.

The archive you submit should have a filename that begins with your team's team number (ie. 424.zip for team 424). The game will be expected to run as intended when it is extracted, so make sure you include all music, WAVs, and, of course, the .MZX file. You will have two choices for entry submission: FTP and HTTP upload. Links to these will become available when game submission becomes available (12 hours into the competition).

Out of these two methods, FTP is by far the recommended one. There are many reasons why FTP is superior to HTTP for the purposes of file submission, but one that applies to submitters is this: when you submit your DoZ entry via FTP, the time you began uploading is the time you will be penalised for (if it occurs in the penalty portion of the grace period). If you use HTTP, the time your upload finishes is the time you will be penalised for. If your submission is quite large and your connection is quite slow, this can make a big difference to your score in the final minutes of the DoZ.

Grace Period. (NB: Grace Period and Patch Submission rules are subject to change for now.) Following the end of the 24 hours, a one hour grace period will be in effect for late submissions and patch submissions (see below). Any games submitted after the first fifteen minutes of this period will receive a score penalty depending on how late it was received. Any games submitted after the DoZ and grace period have ended may be judged, but disqualified.

     1-15:   no deduction from final score
     16-30:  10% deduction from final score
     31-45:  20% deduction from final score
     46-60:  30% deduction from final score
   

Patch Submissions. At your option, you may divide your submission up into multiple archives (as was historically done in a lot of older Megazeux games, where the music and sound files were placed into separate archives to allow users to skip the sound archives to save download time). These archives will then be merged before being released.This is especially useful if you have a slow connection, because it allows you to upload the sound and music files for your entry first and continue working on your game .MZX file, submitting that (and any other changed files) in a second archive at the end. Additionally, you may use this to create patch submissions for your game. The archives will be merged in order of submission time. (Files from newer submissions will overwrite files from older submissions)

When you upload a patch to the game, please use the following naming: ######-N.zip, where ###### is your team number and N is the number of the patch.

MegaZeux Version. The judges will be playing your game in MZX 2.83, so please make sure it runs well in that version before submission. All three SMZX modes are permitted, but no bonus will be given just because you are using SMZX, so if you're going to use it, use it right. It is highly recommended that you do not use MZX fork versions, as the files these produce will not play properly in 2.82b. You run the risk of being scored down, without gaining any advantages.

Other rules.

SCORING AND JUDGES

(Scoreset and text mostly by Wervyn)

Theme - 100/400 (General) 20/400 (Specific)

For the general theme, this should be the most important category. You'll be scored on how well you interpret and use the theme, as well as how much the theme can be felt in all elements of the game. For the specific theme, the purpose of the theme category is more to ensure that you're following the rules than it is to get you points. That said, you'll be sorry if you completely neglect this, since as outlined in the rules, if you receive an average of 5 or less, you will automatically be disqualified.

Gameplay - 90/400 (General) 120/400 (Specific)

The meat and potatoes of any game, if you don't have gameplay, what DO you have? This encompasses how well the game works as a whole, how fluid the play is, and most importantly, whether it's FUN or not.

Graphics - 70/400 (General) 90/400 (Specific)

All this emphasis on graphics over game these days is sickening! But even so, graphics are an important part of the game, since without them, we'd just be playing text adventures (not entirely a bad thing, but still). So, does your game look nice, have you made good use of space and color, or do I want to stab out my eyes as soon as I load the title screen?

Technique - 60/400 (General) 80/400 (Specific)

This is a game-making competition, and so each game is expected to use at least some Robotic. However, all code is not created equal: some code is cooler, faster, shorter and generally just better than other code. Does your code make movement feel slow or smooth? Is your entire game spread out over many, many boards with a lot of repetition, or is it modular and on one board? Is the programming generally impressive?

Story - 50/400 (General) 50/400 (Specific)

Me, I'm a sucker for a good story, I can almost forgive a game for being buggy as hell and for looking like my monitor threw up, if the story sends me into raptures of ecstacy. Almost. Story is important, but it's not going to carry your game any more than your nifty sword engine will. Also, story will be scored according to how important the judge thinks story is to the game. You probably won't get a perfect score here without a perfect plot, but you might get a decent score here for no plot at all, if your game is designed to be a mindless arcade shoot-em-up.

Sound - 30/400 (General) 40/400 (Specific)

Music does for the ears what graphics do for the eyes. Humans being (by and large) visual creatures, this category is only worth about half as much, but it's still important. Music creates ambience, and sound effects heighten the atmosphere. If they don't work with the game, then they might as well not be there. For this reason, you may be awarded a few pity points for having no sound or music , since we firmly believe that no audio is better than bad audio.

Five judges, 400 points each, 2000 points total. Late penalties incurred during the grace period described in the rules will be deducted from this final, 2000 point score. The judges for this Day of Zeux are:

And them's the scoring rules. Good luck.

PARTICIPANTS AND SIGNUP

Sign up is now closed.

The following teams participated in the Day of Zeux:

Questions or comments? Send an e-mail to and we'll try to address your query.