And… They’re Off!

Just posted the ingredients, along with the rest of the 2012 contest rules, so that means Last Chance Game Chef is officially launched.

Let me know if you have any questions or problems and let’s hope that Vincent’s script doesn’t crash! If it does, let us know and please wait a while before trying it again.

Good luck! I can’t wait to see what you come up with.

Theme + Basic Rules Posted

Following the precedent of previous years, I’ve preemptively posted the theme and basic rules of Game Chef 2012 (everything except the ingredients, so you can’t get started just yet), so that people can ask questions before the competition gets fully underway.

I’ve also re-posted the submission thread from last year, in case people are confused about that part of the process or want to check out what the previous competition was like.

Feel free to ask questions here or in the rules thread itself. Looking forward to the final countdown tomorrow, with ingredients announced early-to-mid afternoon. Major love to the folks who’ll be at PAX East this coming weekend! We look forward to having you rejoin us later in the coming week.

Alumni Report: My Daughter, The Queen of France

As part of the build-up to the launch of Game Chef 2012, we’re checking in with a number of recent Game Chef “alumni” to see what their post-contest experience has been like and how their games have continued to develop. Today we spotlight Daniel Wood and his Game Chef 2011 entry, My Daughter, The Queen of France.

Tell us about your game.

William Shakespeare has become estranged from his daughter. In an effort to understand what went wrong, or just reach some sort of emotional closure, he assembles a group of his friends to put on a play about their relationship. All of his friends also knew his daughter and may have their own opinions about what she’s really like and her estrangement from Shakespeare.

Shakespeare directs the play, but he has almost no input into the content of the individual scenes; he must rely on his friends to act out the truth of his relationship with his daughter and hope that it is a truth he can live with. Gameplay revolves around the fact that individual scenes are played more than once — a single scene may be played five or six times over the course of a game — and what this constant reinterpretation eventually reveals about Shakespeare and his daughter.

Alumni Report: The Play’s The Thing

As part of the build-up to the launch of Game Chef 2012, we’re checking in with a number of recent Game Chef “alumni” to see what their post-contest experience has been like and how their games have continued to develop. Today we spotlight Mark Truman and his Game Chef 2011 entry, The Play’s The Thing.

Tell us about your game.

The Play’s The Thing is a storytelling game about actors who want to rewrite the Shakespearean roles they’ve been given. You and your friends tell the story of an acting troupe that is scheduled to perform a new play, but the troupe has a lot of disagreements about how that play should go. While the “playwright” might present you with a classic Shakespearean folio, you’ll use your imagination and wit to craft new events and excitement out of old stories.

la Pummarola Ediscion

Thanks to Paul Czege, Raffaele Manzo, Giulia Barbano, and Mario Bolzoni, we have yet another special development to announce, something completely new and unattempted in Game Chef before.

This year, Game Chef participants may design and submit games written in Italian. Here’s how this will work:

• Design and write a game in Italian, following the announced guidelines and ingredient requirements. Submit it before the deadline along with everyone else, via the Game Chef blog.
• At the peer-review stage, games submitted in Italian will be assigned for peer-review only to others who’ve also submitted games written in Italian. These participants will then post their reviews (in Italian) and recommend one of the games they’ve reviewed to go on to the finals.
• Because the Italian-language community will almost certainly have fewer than twenty submissions, there probably won’t be a clear verdict for which games should go to the finals, just from peer recommendations. So the Italian-language games that receive the most recommendations will be read by Giulia Barbano and Mario Bolzoni, who will select 1-3 games for translation to English, based on what % of total submissions the Italian-language games represent.
• These finalists will then be translated to English by Raffaele Manzo and will go up against the English-language finalists in the final judging.

As always, non-native speakers of English are certainly welcome to submit games written in English. This special opportunity for Italian speakers is really only possible because of the heroic volunteering of Raffaele Manzo, whose translation skills are quite formidable. Hopefully we can build on this experience in the future and offer other opportunities to the vibrant game design communities in other parts of the world.

This announcement is repeated below, in Italian.