So, this game “The Making of: The Best of Both Worlds” is disqualified.
Someone got into my attention about the troll nature of the work, and possible offensive slurs. But… the author just make it very easy for me: he updated the game with new content, and that’s not fair for the other competitors. Take a look at this extract from the external site where the game is allocated:
Finished within four hours of writing, with approximately an hour of planning - more time spent on that would’ve helped. Oh well. Very loosely based off someone I know. Entry for the La Petite Mort category, Ectocomp 2019.
This is supposed to be a haha meta storygame but I’m going to preemptively say that it’s not particularly funny. Follow Cian as he enters a spiral about writing a choose your own adventure in four hours, while lamenting a recent break-up. There’s… not really many endings but a couple pathways you could take.
HEY THERE. FOR THE ZERO PEOPLE WHO WERE EAGERLY AWAITING FOR THE NEW AND IMPROVED STORY OF CIAN, WE’RE FINALLY BACK. WHICH MEANS IT ACTUALLY TOOK JUST A BIT OVER FOUR HOURS TO MAKE THIS THING. BAM: DISQUALIFICATION? BOOM.
Anyway, I think next year we would have to make a harder rules, or more explicit ones. This year I have seen various attempts to test the limits of the comp. Or maybe just some FAQ with clarification on the spirit of the comp. I would hate to harden the lighthearted spirit of this event.
I think that would be good. My first instinct was not to update my game at all until the end of the competition, but after you said bug fixing was kosher I certainly availed myself of that option. I strove to only fix bugs and not add content*, but in some cases the line between them could stand to be sharpened. For instance anything that outputs an error message I felt fine fixing (the perils of a custom engine…), spelling and grammar mistakes seem OK as well. Your message led me to believe adding synonyms was also legit. More debatable is engine updates (e.g. the scrolling is much nicer now than in the original version), I figured that if it didn’t change the text of the game per se it fell within the spirit of the competition, but I can see how others might think otherwise. Another factor is perhaps whether a game is in the Petite Mort or Grand Guignol category. I think I would have been more reluctant to fix typos and add synonyms (though perhaps not outright errors) if I’d made a petite mort game.
* ok one thing that plainly is content that I added was the message when you listen to the ghost. Sorry, I couldn’t help myself from adding a sly wink to @bluef00t’s excellent entry.
I think update for bug fixing and errata is ok. But adding NEW content is just against the spirit of the proper La Petite Mort.
All your updates in your game seem fine to me. All to improve accessibility is fine.
But yes, I think maybe for next year we could drop a rule of “NO IMPROVEMENTS till the end of the comp”. So we can take joy on errata, bad grammar, funny errors and bad parsing.
But game-breaking bugs should be fixed, that I’m pretty sure.
