Henko: Crowd Sourcing
Mar 30 2011
Hi, I'm Dan. I'm a student and an independent game developer. I recently had an experience entering a programming contest with my partner Vince. We made a casual game we think has excellent potential called Henko, only to pull out of the contest because of dubious business practices by the company hosting the contest. It's called crowd sourcing, and it's one way a company will take control of your intellectual property. After doing some research and speaking to lawyers we found out this sort of thing is pretty wide-spread. I suspect many students are falling into the trap. Our experience is a perfect example of why you must be vigilant when entering these contests, and always read rules and contracts carefully before signing them. As a result, we're going rogue, and putting our 48-hour game out for free. We also want to raise a little money for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and to work on Henko 2, so if you're so inclined, leave us a donation at the bottom of the page.
A few weeks ago, Vince and I entered in a programming contest. The contest had students from all over our country programming games in a 48 hour time span to compete for big (for students) cash prizes. We're both seasoned indie developers, working on many projects while studying in software engineering.We are also both GDC Conference Associates. We know our way around the games industry and we know that these contests can sometimes be trouble. We were careful to do our homework before entering this contest. Luckily the FAQ page of the contest answered our question and reassured us all submissions would be co-owned and that we could be published if we won a prize. That seemed fair to me.
The final concern I had was their enforcement of the 48-hour rule. I was expecting some form of check for this rule, to prevent cheating. When I spoke to the people on-site they told me "We're using the honour system, and we know what you can make in 48 hours, so don't worry about it". Not the answer I was expecting (more on this later), but we were honest participants and started on time.
So we made a game. It's called Henko (japanese for deflection), and it has you matching symbols to create arrows. You then throw a Shuriken around the grid to get points. Each arrow you hit increases your multiplier and when you finally hit the sides of the grid, you destroy a wall. If throw your Shuriken through a hole in the wall, it's game over. This is a casual game of strategy. We didn't sleep or do much else but code that weekend. The game turned out great, and we submitted it feeling accomplished with our work. As always a picture is worth a thousand words, so here is Henko:
