It’s the end-of-year holiday season thing! What a great time to start up a game development project, no? Game.Dev thinks so, and the recent Comp 24 announcement has, as always, offered entrants an intriguing concept: developers have to try and make two separate game genres play nice with each other, fitting them together like a pair of demented, metaphorical puzzle pieces in a single package without breaking everything in the process.
Oldschool titles such as Archon, Syndicate, XCOM and about a gazillion others have done this quite well, but it seems that nowadays the only semblance of “genre fusion” that we see in games is the deplorable use of quicktime events in some pretty uninspired situations. See if you can do better: create an RTS with platforming elements, or a point-and-click adventure that occasionally turns into a first-person shooter. Or, you know, anything with anything.
Make reviewers scratch their heads when they have to decide what to put in that cutesy little “genre” box of your game summary. Defy normality, reject compartmentalisation and stick it to the man!
Normal Game.Dev competition rules apply (check over here for details), and the deadline is 31 January. This gives you a little under 2 months to construct something magical and different, so happy devving!