AirConsole Game Dev Contest 2017

I don't see anyone mentioned that yet and I think many would like to be informed <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_wink.gif" alt=";)" title="Wink">

AirConsole has started a new Game Jam - AirConsole Game Dev Contest 2017

Main prize this time is $10 000 - it's really a lot of money, so it's worth a try, isn't it? <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_wink.gif" alt=";)" title="Wink">

There's still a lot of time to prepare as submittion deadline is Feb. 26th 2017.

For those who don't know what AirConsole is, just a brief info.

AirConsole is a kind of substitute for PlayStation or Xbox. So as a developer you have to make a game which will run in a browser (this is where the gameplay is) and an easy HTML5 app which will be your game controller (this will run on the smartphone). You connect both the game and the controller with very simple AirConsole API (functions) and upload it to AirConsole server via their web tool.

They even have a guide for C2 developers here: http://developers.airconsole.com/#/guides/construct2

This is not a first Game Jam from AirConsole. If you're interested, here is the result page of previous Game Jam: http://blog.airconsole.com/2016/03/airc ... ntest.html

Good luck to Everyone! <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_wink.gif" alt=";)" title="Wink">

I participated in the last AirConsole game dev contest, and it was a blast! The admins over there are really nice, and the Construct 2 plugin works fine. They are very helpful if you have any questions about the plugin or developing for AirConsole. Keep in mind that you will need to be able to program in javascript/HTML5 in order to make the phone controller. Other than that, good luck to anyone entering!

Yes you need to do some coding in order to prepare the controller. But for most of controllers (I mean depends how fancy you want to make it) it's just a bit of coding. AirConsole also has a controller generator which helps to prepare standard buttons, joystics etc.

What I was doing in my AC game, was simply sending the C2 Dictionary JSON from controller to the game itself and read that as a message in C2 project. Then based on Dictionary data I was performing some action.

Here's the small code snippet to give a better understanding.

/** Start SCREEN BUTTONS **/
    var startScreen_readyButton = new Button("ready-button", {
        "down": function () {
            airconsole.message(AirConsole.SCREEN, {
                "message": '{"c2dictionary":true,"data":{"action":"player_ready"}}'
            });
        },
    });

    var startScreen_creditsButton = new Button("credits-button", {
        "down": function () {
            airconsole.message(AirConsole.SCREEN, {
                "message": '{"c2dictionary":true,"data":{"action":"goto_credits"}}'
            });
        },
    });
[/code:15zzvksk]

So as you can see I'm just sending here "player_ready" or "goto_credits" string, depends on which button has been clicked on controller. You can even optimize it to send only this string instead of the whole dictionary JSON and then wrap it in C2 after fetching the string.

I was thinking a bit that it could be actually possible to make both controller and the game fully in C2. Just need to rebuild AC C2 plugin a bit and improvize with exports.

Currently AC C2 plugin is only for the game part and you have to code controller yourself, but we can wrap AC controller API into C2 plugin and use it in C2. Is anyone interested in making such plugin? If not I might do it later if I'll have some time. There's still a lot of time to February.

With such plugin C2 users would be able to easily make AC games without need of any manual coding.

Here is another contest with the same prize of 10.000 $ : http://adoptmygame.com

The deadline is : 31st August.

The good thing is that there will be portal owners and investors watching.

Good luck to everyone and thanks — for the info

The deadline is : 31st August.

Thanks — It's 31st August? We have 10th of September today, so this one is over? Or it's annuall and now the deadline is 31st August 2017?

>

> The deadline is : 31st August.

>

>

Thanks — It's 31st August? We have 10th of September today, so this one is over? Or it's annuall and now the deadline is 31st August 2017?

Oops, my bad, seems like it ended at 31st August 2016.

— thanks for writing about the competition!

Concerning the controller: theoretically you could make a construct2 game with the airconsole plugin and just save the exported index.html in the end as controller.html instead of screen.html

The methods are the same for both screen and controller (send message to screen (DeviceID 0) instead of to the controllers).

The game UI though had to be responsive and make sure not to include too many animations, which do not really perform well on mobile.

However, in the end you would have to somehow seperate the two games and controller.html and screen.html have to be in the same directory.

Concerning the controller: theoretically you could make a construct2 game with the airconsole plugin and just save the exported index.html in the end as controller.html instead of screen.html

The methods are the same for both screen and controller (send message to screen (DeviceID 0) instead of to the controllers).

I remember I tried it some months ago and there were few issues. Can't remember from the top of my head but it was regarding some initial settings. So I believe not all from code below can be done with the plugin at the moment.

    var zaController = new ZombieAnnihilationControllerScreen();

    /** -------- AIR CONSOLE INIT --------- **/
    var airconsole = new AirConsole({orientation: AirConsole.ORIENTATION_PORTRAIT});
    var rateLimiter = new RateLimiter(airconsole);

    var sendHandshake = function () {
        airconsole.message(AirConsole.SCREEN, {
            handshake: true
        });
    };
[/code:1xdohsfp]

Also changing the index.html to controller.html is not enough as C2 export needs c2runtime.js, data.js, assets from subfolder etc. So screen and controller exports would overwrite their files. So changes in JS code to properly read relative files would be also needed.

But yeah, it is surely possible, just need to spend some time to figure out what and where should be changed in C2 JS code.
I even remember I asked Ashley in the past if he could point us where exactly should we change paths in order to be able to put related files under separate directories.... but got no reply so this would need to be investigated.

I'm working on a game that I'll try to enter in this contest. Thanks for the heads up!

Nice, I love the concept of AirConsole and programming is not a problem to me, but if someone could change the plugin to make the game fully on C2 it'll be awesome for many people!!

EDIT: — I just gave a quick try on the plugin and the pong demo and I have a question. When developing, how exactly do we test the game? Pressing F5 won't connect the controllers/smartphones, so do we have to export to the airconsole website everytime we want to test the game? Thanks in advance!

— you can upload your game on your test server (any hosting basically). Let's say you have your game placed on http://mygame.siks.com, then all you need to do is run it via the airconsole website. So you run the following URL in your browser: https://www.airconsole.com/?http://mygame.siks.com

In other words you put your website URL as a GET param of AirConsole website.

You upload your game to AirConsole sever when it's ready. No need to upload earlier. So upload on your server for testing/debugging and upload on AC server when it's ready to be published.

— I see, it makes much more sense. I guess it should work with dropbox's public folder, right?

I don't use DropBox so I don't know. Let us know when you try

Well it didn't work on exported projects but I guess they miss the screen.html and controller.html files.

It'll test it properly later when I have a little time.