In honor of rpgmaker.net’s fourth birthday, and to celebrate our awesome users which have helped keep the site going, we are going to have an official site contest on June 3rd, 2011*.

The contest will take the form of a 4-hour game making event in which users will have four consecutive hours to make a game and submit it to be judged. To make the contest more accessible to everyone the game can be created during any block of four hours on June 3rd as long as it gets submitted by the deadline. Yes, this means we will be using the honor system – please don’t take the internets too seriously. There will be a theme for the contest that will be revealed at midnight on June 2nd, 2011.


All contestants will receive achievements and the winner will receive a monetary prize ($25). Losers will receive a complimentary t-shirt** and the sudden realization that they are forever alone on a Friday night. We may see what else we can scrounge up for participants.


- no restrictions on engine or graphics
- the 24 hour period will be for June 3rd central time zone
- the event period has now been switched to 4-hours per kentona's suggestion.
- people shouldn't back out because they can't make an "epic" or "worthwhile" game in the 4-hours. Most attempts are either end up being humorous or have some other gimmick. Develop them further after the deadline if you like.



* Yes, we realize rpgmaker.net officially launched on June 2nd, 2007, but we felt that having this on a weekend night may make the contest more accessible.
** Not really.




Click to reveal the theme

REMEMBER - once you know the theme, you have 4 hours to complete your entry! Don't forget to mention that your submission is for the 4-hour contest to help it move quickly through the submission queue!



So we're like three weeks late and for that I apologize. I played many (but not all) the games during the initial weekend period but didn't communicate very well. I also have some very different ideas on how to handle similar events in the future, and some suggestions on some more serious events we will try. However, there were a decent number of responses and some of the games were actually playable!

So without further ado, the winner is...

*drumroll*

Fire Emblem 6 - TILoRtQatQfP

That makes Dyhalto the winner of a $25 prize. Contact me via PM to arrange payment and/or to select a charity of your choice to receive the funds.

I'll be honest, the game had a couple of things going for it from the start, like the fact that it was crafted with the Sim RPG Maker 95 engine, of which I love. I was the author of the original English translation patches and spent a lot of time testing the engine back in golden days of the internet. It was a unappreciated maker, but one that had a lot of good ideas that would be picked up in later incarnations of the RPG Maker series. It's definitely aged better than its RPG Maker 95 counterpart.

I am also a big fan of strategy/tactical RPGs though I have never played a Fire Emblem game before. The game was an unbalanced mess but was still pretty fun to play. Some of the units were dramatically overpowered and some were practically worthless. The dialogue was intentionally nonsensical. However, it was pretty cool how new units kept appearing during battle – more than once I found myself redirecting units to prevent surprise flanks.

Fire Emblem 6 - TILoRtQatQfP was ranked the top birthday game by two of the three judges, and was ranked number two by the other.

Runner-up was the RPG Maker 2003 game Sinfonia by Max McGee. It was pretty cool to have an actual attempt at a proper game in a contest obviously designed for blatant use of comedy and tropes.

I'll let the other judges chime in with their thoughts on the games if they are interested.