ECTOCOMP 2015 - RESULTS!

Competitions
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Gather round, ghosts and ghouls, it’s time to reveal the results of ECTOCOMP 2015!

It was a very close competition, with a very high standard of entry, but I’m pleased to announce that the winner in La Petit Mort category is Open That Vein by Chandler Groover, with The Oldest Hangover on Earth by Marius Müller in second place and Heezy Park by Andrew Shultz in third!

La Petit Mort

#1 Open That Vein by Chandler Groover 7.43
#2 The Oldest Hangover on Earth by Marius Müller 6.8
#3 Heezy Park by Andrew Shultz 6.4
#4 The Story of the Shinobo by Adri Mills 6.12
#5 Halloween Dance by Mathbrush 6.03
#6 Home/Sick by Felicity Banks 5.96
#7 The Ghost Ship by Jonathan Snyder 5.5
#8 The Physiognomist’s Office by Christina Nordlander 4.77
#9 Food, Drink, Girls by Roboman 3.3

In Le Grand Guignol category there was just a hair’s breadth between the winning entry, Ashes by Glass Rat Media and Invasion by Cat Manning in second place. All were worthy entries and I very much enjoyed playing them!

Le Grand Guignol

#1 Ashes by Glass Rat Media 7.5
#2 Invasion by Cat Manning 7.3
#3 Nine Lives by Merlin Fisher 6.17
#4 Voice Box by B Minus Seven 5.6

I know some of you don’t like to have your notes and scores made public, so shall I leave you to publish your own in this thread? Otherwise I can send them to authors individually by email on request. Or we can do it the old way. Perhaps I should do a poll…

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Woot! Congratulations everyone [emote]:D[/emote]

This was a ton of fun to participate in and I am absolutely delighted to squeak in where I did among such fine competition.

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Woohoo! It’s nice to see that everyone beat their ifcomp scores. [emote]:)[/emote]

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That’s an interesting point - should I be surprised that most of the Ectocomp authors were also IFComp authors?

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Animal names certainly seem popular with Le Grand Guignol entrants. I wonder if B Minus Seven would have done better if he’d called himself Bee Minus Seven?

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Nice. Not too surprised my the rankings.

Feel free to make my notes public if you want!

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but not animal games, even those with bestial sweet little kitty deaths in my favorite Nine Lives:wink:

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Congrats, Glass Rat! Cat and Merlin as well: I can’t feel too bad about placing below such impressive entries. And since Voice Box was meant for La Petit Mort, I know how hard it is to finish something in three hours. Kudos all around.

If I’d called myself Bea Minus Seven, perhaps I would have headed off this confusion: I’m a woman. No worries, I know everyone online is presumed male until proven guilty. Ambiguity aside, I like the look of the letter B better. B Myna Seven?

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nooooooo

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evil maniacal laugh [emote]:twisted:[/emote]

(also YAY someone liked my game! Someone liked my game!)

… ahem.

I was surprised at the low score curve of IFComp, honestly. I’m glad the raters of EctoComp were a bit more generous with the 10 point scale. Of course, it’s a freaking speed jam, so if we all got rated according to the rubric of the largest comp of the year, all the EC entrants would be snuggling down in the sub-5 gutter together. Though I didn’t enter IFComp, so my perfect goose egg there wasn’t hard to beat. ^^

I’m surprised at some of the scores, particularly how far “Open that Vein” came in above the rest. It was better than some of the others but I wouldn’t say a LOT better. I thought “Physiognomist’s Office” had a great atmosphere, even if it was basically a two-move game and the only puzzle in it was bugged; I would like to see it expanded.

and sorry J, but you misspelled “Shinoboo” again. Don’t hate on the puns. Puns are great.

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It’s interesting to see how everyone voted. I rated Ghost Ship pretty high, and I gave Shinonoo a 10. I just loved how cute it was.

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Shinoboo was /so/ cute.

I didn’t play/vote on all the games because I couldn’t get gargoyle to work and the parser I have wouldn’t read everything. The overall quality was really high though. I graded on a curve for speed fic but not too charitable of one – I rated them pretty much how I’d rate on ifdb

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Shinoboo was adorable, agreed!

I used a slight curve for LPM games, but like GlassRat, not much of one. One of the reasons I rated Open That Vein as highly as I did (other than naturally gravitating towards its atmosphere/writing) was for how few verbs were necessary and thus how easy it would be for a relative newcomer to IF to get into the story. I know that doesn’t necessarily matter to many people, but it’s something I’ve thought about lately.

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I apologise for misspelling Shinoboo, I did this the first time I typed it and all other errors are the result of copying and pasting. The .z5 file is actually called narrative-of-the-halloween-ninjas.z5 so I was probably typing it from memory. I don’t know if ‘Shinoboo’ is a reference to something I didn’t get, or why everything was so tiny, or what the game had to do with ninjas (I don’t remember seeing any), but it was fun to play!

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“Shinoboo” is a pun. “Boo!” has been combined with “shinobi,” which is a ninja. The characters in the game are tiny ninjas. Maybe the game doesn’t actually explain this… I forget. I knew them from The Legend of the Missing Hat.

Anyhow, I asked J.J. not to put out my scores because I didn’t leave any comments on them, but I finally finished writing about the games over in this thread: <a class=“postlink-local” href="https://intfiction.org/t/my-2015-ectocomp-impressions/9315/1

For myself, I don’t think I need to see my scores if anyone wants to keep them private, but if people left comments, it’d be nice to read those! PM or email is good if the ballots won’t be posted on the forum.

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Thanks again, Jason, for holding this! It inspired a game I’d otherwise not have written, but the sort I always sort of wanted to.

Yeah, I think so, too. I definitely bumped scores up and try to make it a point to curve them so the average is 5.5 or thereabouts. Because I think we can and should be more forgiving towards mistakes for something that takes just 3 hours to write. I imagine people consciously or subconsciously rate things on a curve, and really, when I was writing, I wasn’t worried about what score it would get.

I also felt very bad about giving a 2 one year, so I bumped it up a point and now reserve that for troll games, which EctoComp has never had, which is awesome.

The thing is, we’re looking for more, hey, that’s a neat idea vs was it developed robustly? And I think that most of these games were like that, and I think that’s good, because it inspires the players to see, well, something doesn’t have to be super detailed. It reminds us that we don’t have to struggle too hard for something to work.

And I suppose another way to look at it is, if we rated any poem in a novel competition, it’d do badly, because it doesn’t fit the bill.

Well, we had a thread in the author subforum which said “make a game before IFComp ends!” And EctoComp fell during that. I think it’s a great stress-reliever, to have something people will judge less harshly, and quite possibly there may be an idea that fell out that didn’t quite fit in their big work that people can use in something smaller. Also, yes, I’m amused about the higher scores in EctoComp than IFComp. Good find!

Finally, yay to my best place ever! Both absolute and percent-wise. It’s no shame at all to place behind the two people I did, and their works. While I don’t want to reveal my ratings, I will say that (IIRC) the average ratings for the top two were very close to what I sent in, and I liked both of them enough I won’t be going back to my mail to sort out the details.

Also, I’ll send in my critiques later but I’ll eliminate scores.

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I’m glad that everyone enjoyed the competition. I like that the less pressured environment it creates encourages creativity, and that a few people wrote their first ever game for ECTOCOMP. I shall also have to check out The Legend of the Missing Hat now to see what these Tiny Ninjas are all about.

I have another idea for a genre-based competition which I’m really excited about. I’m hoping to run it in the Spring, perhaps after Spring Thing is finished or whenever it’s not too busy.

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Congratulations Everybody!

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That was a lot of fun. Doing some speed IF was on my bucket list, and I was especially grateful for the forgiving nature of the comp.

Happy to have comments public and/or private. My personal email is fellissimo @ Hotmail dot com (no spaces and the dot is a real dot of course) if that helps).