   Quarterly contests?
  Frankly, the only thing that gets me off my butt and into finishing a game is a good contest.  There have been contests before on GameDev (e.g. the perennial favorite, 4E), but they're very few and very far between.Themed contests are good, because they keep (most) people from using a project they were already mostly done with in the competition which has a specific begin and end date.  Doing 4 Elements again would probably eliminate that advantage of the format.Another format is severely time-limited contests (e.g. the recent 3H GDC in the Lounge).  This format takes away the advantage of tons of spare time.  In a 2-month contest, one person could spend 80 hours and another only 15.  In a 3-hour contest, it really levels the playing ground.Requiring a specific output format could be another way to theme a contest--Console (that is, command line) games only, for instance.  Perhaps making a game in 320x240x8bpp mode for retro's sake.Perhaps an AI contest, having each contestant's AI battle eachother in a given setting in a double-elimination tournament (public video archive a must).  I think this has been done here before, a long time ago.  A more low-key AI environment could also be used, like writing the best AI for a specific variation of chinese checkers, with a 5-second move time limit.There are also artists on this site, and good ones.  You could create a game with all external media files, then have a contest to see who could make the game the most polished and professional while just modifying the external files.The key is to have a contest where prior work will have as little impact as possible on the contest entry.  Any other ideas for contests out there?~BenDilts( void );   
Quote:Original post by BeanDog[...]Perhaps making a game in 320x240x8bpp mode for retro's sake.[...]I think a limited-output contest would be nice, especially if they limited the output to 320*240 w/ 4 bit color (1 bit 'bright' for +0.333 to all components, 1 bit for R G B with off=0.000 and set=0.667)With 256 colors, great art still isn't too hard for a talented artist, but once you get to 16 colors with a specified palette, art skill doesn't matter as much unless you're a talented pixel painter.It might also be neat to have a contest based on specified art, where everybody can only use specified images, and can't modify them in any way beyond changing transparent parts to color keys or rotating and/or mirroring the whole image - no filtering (beyond that required to make rotation look decent), no resizing, no drawing vector art on top of the images, etc.This would really test creativity, but the art would need to be well-done game art and would need to fit together, not just random images taken from various places on the web.   