I know all I’ve been writing about recently is about the Liberated Pixel Cup but I’m really, really excited for the contest. This’ll all be over soon.

While I’ll be writing specifically about the LPC, these tips should be useful for any game maker…

The first thing you need to do is pick out a genre (or genres) you’d like to use and think you can pull off within the allotted time. Once you’ve got that, pick a game engine that’s written in a programming language you are already familiar with:

Python gamers can use pygame, Java devs can stick with lwjgl, C/C++ devs can use Allegro, to name a few of the already available game engines that can help get the job done quicker.

Now, depending on your genre, there’s a number of things you can do between now and the day you actually start coding (July 1st for the LPC).

Storyboard

Unless you’re writing a Yet Another Tetris Clone, your game needs a story. You should write out how you’d introduce the gamer to your game, from the Title Screen, Intro/Outro, the events that happen within the story, how he defeats up the Villains, saves the Princesses and the credits roll.

Detail everything as much as you can. Write the dialogue that the NPCs might speak, or think of alternate paths the player might take.

Prototyping

You never get things right the first time. Specially if its your first time. The best way to get some advantage over fellow competitors is to start early, and start prototyping. Make a few maps of the places where the player might visit. Draft the Overworld map, complete with castles and caves. Make mockups of the UI, the Battle screen, the Item screen and any other screens the player might see.

Plan the Content

You can actually request some things be made during the June contest, but in the event that the one important feature you wanted isn’t made, scour the Interwebs for content that’s Freely-licensed (Creative Commons, yo!) and you can use in your game. Tiles, Sprites, Enemies, Animations, Music.
You never know what you’ll be missing. As a note, you won’t get points for using content that wasn’t submitted for the Cup, but it’s best to be ready.

Play with the Engine!

Before the contest starts, It’s a good idea to start looking at the engine, and the libraries you might use. Think of all the features you’d like the game to have, like networking support, sound, gamepad support or displaying ogv videos on screen. Now look up libraries that can help you accomplish these, and start playing with them. Read the documentation on how to use these libraries, start a sample project or three. Screw up, try again, and document your efforts. You’ll be glad you did.

Have a reasonable goal

The LPC contest will last a month, for the coding part. I know you’d love to build a 60 hour RPG epic where the Plumber saves the Princess from the evil dinosaur, but be reasonable: You’ll have to debug that 60 hour content, and who knows if you’ll hold The Judges attention for 60 hours. Scale down the efforts and concentrate on making your main features shine. That secret minigame that you hid inside the pub if you press the Konami code? It probably won’t be found by the judges, so you might as well not add it.

Over all… Have Fun!

It’s a friendly competition among game devs. You’re welcome to join the conversation at #LiberatedPixelCup on Freenode, where some of us are already discussing what sorts of games we’ll be building for the contest.

By August, we’ll be playing at least a dozen new games, so in the end, it doesn’t matter who takes the cup, at least we’ll have all sorts of GPL’d Games we can all play and modify!