Archive: SRIII Competition

Recently there's been a long thread in comp.sys.acorn.games about the ease (or lack thereof) of producing realistic graphics for a game featuring beat-em-up style moves. A lot of people seemed to think it would be the work of a few minutes to digitise some moves and turn them into an attractive, fluid, realistic on-screen animation. Thus Godhead, the team behind the development of Stryker's Run III (see the News page), decided to lay down the gauntlet and run a competition to give everyone the chance to try it for themself, with the chance of winning a personalised, free copy of Stryker's Run III. This was how it appeared in the newsgroup:

From: csydrj@scs.leeds.ac.uk (D R Jefferies)
[1] *Stryker Competition*
Date: Thu Nov 16 05:07:45 GMT 1995

> > There is _no_ good beat-em-up for the Arc. Not even a double-dragon
> > type one, let alone SF2
>
> Granted. And it's about time one came along.


There is. It's called Stryker's Run III, and it'll be out just as soon as it's perfect.

> Even digitised, the sheer volume of the graphics would still have to be
> fairly huge for a decent game of the type Pete was talking about.
> Especially in view of your next comment...
>
> > The digitiser can be b/w and you can colour in the characters after.
> > You can grab X frames per second using the digitiser
> > shrink the sprites and touch them up.

Stryker currently uses over 1000 frames of animation, mainly produced using exactly this method. And as our contribution to this on-going discussion, we'd like to give everyone a prime opportunity to try it out for themselves.

Give us an email (Ed: see below), and we'll send you 16 frames of raw, black & white digitised footage of our karate expert simply walking from one side of the screen to the other. All you have to do is turn this into an animation of a game character (in colour) walking on the spot, on a black background. The character should be about 64 pixels high, in mode 13, and you can dress him/her in any clothes you like.

Should be pretty simple, eh? But we're so generous that we're going to offer a prize of a shiny new copy of the game to the person that produces the best animation/character design. Not only that, but it will be a personalised copy featuring their character in a walk-on part.

The catch is, however, that nobody is allowed to continue going on about how trivial it is to do game graphics until they have submitted their entry to us.

We'll put the best entries in a publicly readable location.

Godhead (Stryker's Run III development team)

Email: csydrj@scs.leeds.ac.uk

However, don't email them for a copy of the digitised footage! Instead, download it by clicking here (you can't any longer since the competition is now closed). This is a Sparkive containing JPEGs.

There are no width restrictions on the character, and designs should be submitted in any sensible form - for example, a series of sprite files or a short program to animate your character - to csydrj@scs.leeds.ac.uk before the 1st of December.

Good luck!

Please note that this competition has no connection with these WWW pages, and is reproduced in good faith at the request of the competition's organisers.

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