48 Hour Coding Challenge, The First. Rules

48 Hour Coding Challenge, The First: Rules and Guidelines

Overview
The goal of this challenge is to make a game in 48 hours. The game should follow the theme for this challenge which is endangered species, and/or a classic/retro game. You can see this gives you quite a bit of freedom to do what you want. Described below are the specific rules regarding content, timeline, submission etc.

Competition Timeline
Begins at 0:00hrs on Saturday 20th March.
Ends at 23:59hrs on Sunday 21st March.
Entries should be submitted by the competition end to avoid any penalties (like nasty red letters saying you're late!). See below for exceptions to this.
Time is based on Australian EDT (Eastern Daylight Savings Time), and the Sumea clock (note that the sumea forum clock may not be EDT if you have set it as a different time zone).
If you live in a different (non-EDT) timezone (such as NZ or WA), you can start and finish the competition on your local time, be sure to note in your submission that you are in a different timezone to avoid late penalties.

Design and Concept stage
You MAY design your game, design your program layout (not in code though), concept art, etc. and most general pre-production stuff before the competition starts. Anything (code, art assets and other resources, sound etc.) that are in the submitted version of your game must be developed inside the competition's 48 hour timeframe.

Entry Rules/Guidelines
All code must be written during the 48hours of the competition. that is, between midnight friday and midnight sunday. You may not use any pre-existing code that you have written (such as engine or framework code). All to be done from scratch.

Any resources (such as textures, sounds, graphics) must also be your own work and also must be created in the 48 hour timeframe. No pre-existing work to be used. However, you may use music that is not of your own creation (or is pre-existing). You must either have permission to use the music if it is not public domain, or it must be public domain.

The game must be concepted on the theme of the challenge. The theme for this challenge is a classic/retro game, or endangered species. Or even better, a combination of both! This means you can either simply remake an old classic (missile command, tetris, mario, whatever), you can create a new game using an old classic as a basis for the gameplay (afterburner...but with dragons! oops, sorry panzer :P), you can create an entirely new concept, but that looks and feels like a retro game, you can create a game that uses the subject of endangered species, or features an endangered species.
As you can see there is a pretty huge scope for what you can create in this competition, it shouldn't be too hard to find something interesting.

You can use any external libraries (ones you haven't created yourself) to develop the game. You can also use any programming language you wish (be wary of anything that does not compile to a win32 executable however, you may need to include appropriate interperator programs etc.).

The completed game archive, including all resources and any non-standard libraries (see below), must not exceed 5Mb.
Source code may be submitted in a seperate archive. It does not count toward your 5Mb limit.

Standard Libraries
The following "standard" libraries may be assumed to be present on the end-users system, and are not required to be included in your game archive.

DirectX 9.0, OpenGL, Windows libraries (winmm etc.). You can also assume the end user has the latest *decent* (ie. Sun, not microsoft) Java Virtual Machine.
Any other libraries (such as SDL, OpenAL, FMod) must be included in your archive to ensure they will run on the end users system. Also, if you require an emulator to run the game (such as GBA or mobile), you need to include the emulator in your archive. Use of emulators is discouraged due to the extra setup etc. required by the user. Standalone win32 executables are highly preferred.

System Requirements
As a minimum you can assume that the end user has the following:
A reasonably fast cpu (500+).
At least 128mb system memory.
A reasonable 3d graphics card (TNT2+ or so).
A sound card.
Mouse + Keyboard.
Windows 98 SE (people won't be penalised much if they are unable to test on older OS's than what they develop on though).
DirectX 9.0, OpenGL, JVM support.

Submission
Entries should be posted as a message in the official (when it's created) challenge submission thread. This thread will be for submissions only, no discussion. The entry should give a brief description of the game, and provide a link where it can be downloaded from. The link should point to an archived ZIP file containing your entry. The entry should extract into it's own folder. The entry (archive) should be no larger than 5Mb. If your entry requires doing more than deleting the folder to clean up (such as removing registry entries), then you should provide an appropriate uninstall process.
If you wish to provide source code for your game (and you should!) you should post this (once again ZIP archive) as a seperate link in your submission.
You may work in a pair of two programmers if you wish (the intent that a less experienced programmer can work with a more experienced programmer). No artist+programmer teams allowed! The result should be a single entry submitted by one of the team members, just note that you are a pair in the submission, and who you worked with.

Judging
The most controversial bit...
The games will be "judged" by a vote from sumea members who have played the games. Basically this will just come down to peoples favourite games, but people playing them should try and keep the following in mind (imo):
Completeness - How "finished" does the game seem. Please don't be *too* harsh on our poor programmer art :)
Theme - How well does it capture the retro/classic/endangered species them. This should be like "Not at all", "It says endangered species on the splash screen but the game was about breeding rabbits", "Used the theme very thouroghly and consistently throughout". (of course here i've used the endangered species them as an example a bit).
Gameplay - Most importantly, is the game fun to play, or is it worse than slipping over and landing face first in cow crap.

Please post any questions you have about these rules in this thread. Hopefully they sit well with everyone, the competition rules, themes etc. were discussed for a couple weeks and no-one objected at the end, so it's too late if you want to object now! :)
If you wish to discuss your own game, you can start a enw thread for your game (as kezza, tachyon and kane have done so far), you can discuss other peoples games in their threads!
If you have any queries/comments not related to the rules, and not related to a specific game, use the challenge's general discussion thread.
When it comes time to submit your entry use the submission thread or your entry may get lost!

*Edit: 14/3 - Added Java Virtual Machine to standard libraries.