Doomed To Success: The 7 Day FPS Challenge
The trouble with the 7 Day FPS Challenge is that its name is just so damned cryptic. I'm going to have to spend hundreds of words explaining what it means to you before I can even begin to say anything useful about it.
Right, let's start at the beginning. When God decided to build the universe, he first had to travel forward in time and consult the ancient Jewish calendar, thus establishing that a week would eventually come to constitute seven days. He then proceeded to conveniently build the universe within this arbitrary, but admittedly useful for the purposes of scheduling, timeframe.
When God decided to build Doom in 1992, he first had to travel forward in time to read games magazines circa 1996 that had gradually stopped referring to other shooting games as "Doom clones" and instead as 'first-person shooters.'
When Jan Willem Nijman, Sos Sosowski and Sven Bergström decided to create the 7 Day FPS Challenge, they first had to voyage to Mount Doom and throw someone's jewellery into it, before reflecting upon recent and older concepts in videogaming that might be combined in order to create something fresh and new. Still coated in ash and ichor from their journey through Sauron's kingdom, they settled on merging the indie game-jam with the first-person shooter, in the manner of the popular 7 Day Roguelike competition.
So, to recap:
A first-person shooter is a videogame in which the player shoots things from a first-person perspective, as popularised by the 1993 videogame Doom.
"First-person shooter" can be contracted to "FPS."
God built the universe in a week, or at least he did if you're a crazy person who doesn't believe in evolution. A week comprises seven days.
Jan Willem Nijman, Sos Sosowski and Sven Bergström are orchestrating a worldwide gamejam in which anyone participating attempts to build a first-person shooter with seven days. This is, you see, a "challenge."
Hence, "The 7 Day FPS Challenge." I hope this makes sense to you. I can go over it again if not.
The 7 Day (because it takes place over a week) FPS (because it involves creating a first-person shooter) Challenge (because doing this is quite tricky) commences proper on June 9. You can gaze helplessly at at its non-interactive front-page here, or follow what people are saying about it on Twitter here, but to be honest you'd be better off brainstorming/learning how to make a videogame ahead of the launch in 3 days. We'll report more soon after the whole shebang kicks off.
(3 days is just under half a week. It is not as much as seven. Therefore, it is not the period in which you should attempt to make a first-person shooter. That would be too much of a challenge, and also not part of this particular challenge. Again, hope this is clear. If there are any questions, you can reach me via fax or pager.)
