Guidelines

When creating your game, we suggest you follow these guidelines in order to improve both its performance and players experience.

Technical Guidelines

• The game should be noob friendly. Can make a workable AI with a bunch of ifs.
• If it is a game with limited output options per turn, send those options in the protocol (e.g. the first player of chess has 20 possible actions).
• Viewer should be enough to understand most of the rules.
• Gameplay based around rounds/turns. Only perform checks (collision, presence, etc.) at the end of a turn.
• End player’s program when it outputs an unrecognised command. Continue player’s program when it outputs a recognised but invalid command and add error message to summary.
• Stop game early if players aren’t doing anything or are otherwise stalemated.
• Stop game early if the ranking is decided whatever the players may do.
• Always minify png and jpg assets.
• The Referee must not crash, make sure all possible exceptions are caught, especially during the parsing of a Player’s actions, where most errors occur.
• Minimum font size: 36px.

Soft Limits

The following limits will make your game run faster, but they are not strict limitations.

• Statement length: less than 6k characters
• Total entity creations: less than 200.
• Max total time alloted to the players: 25s.

Protocol:

The following lines will help most players to get into your game. Try to simplify things when possible.

• Two loops max for input.
• Variables to read per loop: less than 10.
• Stub generator must not exceed: 45 lines of Java.
• If the player is given an ID, it is always 0.

Graphics:

• Privilege the use of Sprites over Shapes (Rectangle, Circle, etc.)
• Use less than 2Mb total for assets.

Games with leagues

• Stubs should, if possible, be the same for every league.
• If a game needs at least 1 data structure to make an AI that doesn’t crash, it needs an easier league.

Rules

When contributing on CodinGame, you must accept and apply these rules:

• Your game must not contain any kind of inappropriate content.
• Write a stub generator. The documentation can be found in the CodinGame SDK repository. Any non-explicit variable must be explained with a comment.