Designing games for Netbooks – a $5,000 competition

Tweet

Intel is trying hard to push its Intel Atom Developer program to encourage developers to make games targeted at Netbooks.

Their latest promotion is a game design competition organised by The Game Creators.

The design guidelines say a good game for a netbook will consider the following:

• Relax modes: game play option that is not tied to a clock or requires race to finish a task
• Social Integration: Allowing you to share or post your achievements, score as a status update to your social networks
• Uncluttered: reduced screen size means the game should be a clean uncluttered experience – without a lot of text, dialogue boxes or windows to distract from the game experience
• Fun: Netbooks are fun & social devices – make the game interesting and fun, goal should be for someone to show their friend what just happened on the screen
• Relatable: Games do not have to be complex, they could be as simple as virtually flipping a coin as long as it’s a relatable activity that has replay value
• Location aware: Netbooks travel with you, are taken on vacation, and on road trips. Integrate location awareness to maximize the experience
• Simplified Controls: There’s no mouse or joystick on a netbook. Trackpads are small, keyboards tend to be crowded, and screen real estate is precious. Good netbook games take this into consideration and design the game for simple inputs from the trackpad.

There are four categories and the top prize is a holiday worth £5,000. If you’re interested, check out the competition at http://www.thegamecreators.com/intelcompo. Closing date is 4th October.

Related posts

• Competition: Win 1 of 3 copies of Facebook Graph API Development with Flash
• Libel on Facebook costs ex-friend £22,000
• QuakeLive hits 100,000 registrations in 6 hours, falls over
• Dofus has 3 million active users and 500,000 active subs
• Social Games get proper games designers – Eric Lindstrom of Tomb Raider fame joins SGN