Also, I wonder how the guys at HBGames will enforce the rule... :O
We're not going to be so stringent as to ask for your .capx's.
The limitations AFAIK are basically that you are limited to 100 events, and max 4 layers.
So if you give us a game with 6 moving parallaxes and like 6000 dudes running around on the screen, we MAY have to disqualify you (or ding you a lot of points ... Not sure which I'd prefer to do, I guess it depends on how many successful entries we get).
Why do we need to use the free version? we payed for the full features to the engine, this is not really promoting what the engine can do if were limited to the free feature's.
The contest -- though money IS at stake -- is mainly to distribute copies of the engine to people who don't have it.
While people who already OWN the full version of the engine are still welcome to participate, it's giving them an unfair advantage to let them make a game that can be potentially bigger/more impressive because it doesn't have the same restraints that everyone else is working with.
It's like baseball. Sure, Tony McGuire was a demon on steroids. But it's not really a level playing field if one guy is massively juiced up.
Any other limitations?
You have to be over age 13, or have parental consent if you're under 18.
And it ... Can't be laden with outright pornography. No NSFW!
Common sense stuff.
HBG is not a very strict forum. Don't worry too much about limits.
And what about contributed plugins? Any restrictions on using those (as in the Scirra Arcade)?
You're free to use whatever resources or plugins that you can find.
You can't like ... Take someone else's game, and modify the colors or something, and re-release it. That wouldn't be very cool of you!
But other than outright plagiarizing something else, please use whatever tools you have at your disposal to make this as fancy as you can within the time limit.