Hello, everyone.
It’s that time of year again! The 2013 IntroComp is now underway. Please (re)acquaint yourself with the rules and sign up to be an author at allthingsjacq.com/introcomp
Cheers!
- Jacqueline
Especially if you’re an ichthyophobe.
I wish I could ‘like’ the post above…
And speaking of rules, I updated the FAQ this morning after receiving a question that I seem to get just about every year. The addition is as follows:
WHAT LANGUAGE CAN I USE? ON WHICH PLATFORMS CAN ENTRIES BE RELEASED?
So long as your work is interactive fiction, there are no restrictions. Interactive fiction, in this case, is broadly defined as things that are (1) interactive and (2) either fiction or non-fiction, and include any and all languages and platforms. Inclusion of graphics and multimedia is fine, unless such inclusion is so excessive that a reasonable player would look at the work and call it a graphic adventure.
Thank you to those who’ve submitted intents to enter already - it’s looking like it’s going to be a fun year, and I hope we get even more intents before June 15th!
- Jacqueline
Question. (I figured I should ask her, since others may be in similar situations.)
I’ve been toying with a concept that could be perfect for an IntroComp entry - i.e. it’s something a bit unusual that I’m curious to see if the community would like, and you can get a pretty good sense of it from just the introduction. However, even if it did well, the chances of me turning it into a complete game anytime soon are slim to none. (Eventually, perhaps, but I have another pretty hefty project underway right now.)
So what happens if something like this places in the top three, and the author explicitly states that he or she doesn’t intend to finish the game any time soon? Obviously, they don’t get the prize money, but how is the game listed in the official results? Is this too much against the spirit of IntroComp? etc.
I just spoke to Jacq about this. The skinny is more or less that there’s no particular reason to stop you: given that the majority of entrants (and the majority of entrants who place) never finish, it’s a bit mean-spirited to ban someone for acknowledging this.
But bear in mind that you might pay a bit for your honesty: personally, I’d probably dock a point or two from a game that came with an explicit ‘I will never finish this’ note from the author. One of the things I consider when looking at an Introcomp entry is: how much confidence do I have that the author will be able to turn this into a great full-length game? If you say you’re never finishing it, that confidence is obviously going to be zero. A high vote in Introcomp is a way of saying ‘yes, please complete this game!’ - which is a dumb thing to say to someone who’s definitely not going to.
I’m not a comp guy myself (and I’m pretty much disqualified from this one anyway, since even my free games are produced with commercial intent), but IntroComp is pretty much my favorite of all the comps as a player, so three cheers for its continued success! [emote]:)[/emote]
Well, not so much “I will never finish this” as “I may finish this, especially if there’s a lot of interest, but it’s not at the top of my stack so it’s going to take awhile.” But point understood.
Okay, ‘I probably won’t finish this unless it places, and even then I probably won’t make the one-year deadline’ is so close to the default that I wouldn’t worry about it.