ECTOCOMP La Petite Mort and testing time, does it count?

Competitions
1

So, for next Ectocomp, I’m starting to exchange testing services with other participants (yeah, so soon), but one of them is aiming for La petite mort, but I can’t remember if testing time count for the global limit of 4 hours for that category. How was for past editions?

(Yeah, yeah, I know, I’m a co-host, I should have decided on this, but I wanna open this for the community, and hear about the customs in the past).

Right now we have this in the rules:

Games submitted for La Petite Mort should be written in 4 hours or less.

  1. Any time spent planning, thinking, doodling, researching, etc does not count.
  2. Any time spent writing words or code that end up in-game totally does count.
    (With the exception of if you wrote game engine or library code in the past and now you’re using it.)

And yes, we have added 1 hour to the limit.

So if we count testing and fixing the bugs of earlier testers, you can dedicate 1 hour of the development to testing. So I vote to have the time fixing things previously to release for the comp as totally counting in.

I mean, some of the fun of games done very quickly is the roughness and bugs.

What do you think?

2

If time spent fixing bugs and revising text doesn’t count as part of the four-hour limit, then you can spend any amount of time improving your game, right? That hardly seems to be in the spirit of the speedy nature of La Petite Mort.

If you’re talking about time spent literally testing, meaning the game is being played by other people and you’re waiting for them to give you feedback so you can make revisions, then I’d say that’s not “time spent writing words or code” and I wouldn’t count it. But having somebody test your game so you can revise it based on feedback hardly seems to be in the spirit of the speedy nature of La Petite Mort.

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