What are the criteria for judging?
For instance:
There is no established standard; use your own judgement. However!
Everybody has their own standards; in practice most people use some combination. I personally have a hard limit: I don’t give more than a 5 in 1-10 comps unless I had an enjoyable or enlightening time, regardless of technical accomplishment. (Technical ability is worth bugger all unless it’s in service to something.) So, yeah, account for how ably made the thing is, but it’s disingenuous to pretend to be totally suspending your personal tastes.
Again, no established standard here, but I’d say no. My feeling is that by entering a rated competition, you’re declaring that you’re among your peers, that you want to be judged by the same standards as everyone else. I’d go easier on a promising-but-flawed first-time author in a review, for sure, but I think it’s kind of patronising to give bonus points for novice status.
As a final reminder, you have just two more days to play and vote on the games.
If interested, visit:
Greg
The votes are in, and the results of this year’s Spring Thing are as follows:
More detailed results are at:
I’ll be in contact with entrants later today regarding prizes.
Many thanks to this year’s entrants, and thanks also to all who voted and donated prizes.
Greg
Yay! Mostly Useless! Congrats! [emote]:D[/emote] [emote]:P[/emote]
So this means you are NOT that useless, after all [emote]:P[/emote]
Congrats all!
Congrats to mostly useless and to all entrants!
Oh. My. Whaaa?!?
Thank you so much everyone! More thoughts when my head has stopped spinning…
Yay! [emote]:D[/emote]
Thanks for the reviews, maga. But no pictures this year? You disappoint me!
Yeah, that was a bug. The epilogue should vary based on which of the three mini ‘subquests’ you’ve completed, but I messed up and it gives the ‘you did this’ response for each regardless of whether you actually did (which is better than giving the ‘you failed’ message, that would have been horrible!). This will be fixed in a post-comp release soon.
By the way, if I could write something half as entertaining as a Just William book I could die happy. I’ve never come across Oram & Kitamura, so I’ll be checking them out shortly.
Do. World-class children’s illustration.
Yeah, sorry about that. I poked around at a few ideas for a while, but I’m in a bit of a rut drawing-wise at the moment.
Oh! Angry Arthur was my favourite book as a small person! I completely forgot what it was called and was trying to hunt it down for a couple of months, searching for things like “best illustrations ever” and “really angry kid”. My word, that kid got angry. Thanks for filling in another gap!
Oops, this is a bit late.
I have to admit I was kind of exhausted from writing the game and didn’t pay attention to things. But I’d like to thank Greg Boettcher for organizing things–AND for reminding me about payment more than once (I have this thing about not clicking PayPal links) and for the people giving prizes and the judges.
I wasn’t in it for the prize money, but it was nice motivation. I wanted to have written this game, and I’m working to make it better, with Real Plot and anything. It’s good to see the writer ahead of me is working for that, too, and it’s good to see the writer behind me got a good score.
And seriously, this was good motivation for me to write a big game I’d always wanted to. I had the idea back last May but had to break this off from Shuffling Around, and it -still- took a while to organize, and I still found stuff I need to tune up. There’ll be a post-comp version. There was a rush against time to make my game more than a glorified beta, but I also didn’t want to leave it for next year. And I knew this game would have faults, but I didn’t want to use that as an excuse to 1) submit something badly buggy or 2) never submit anything at all.
Apologies to people who got tangled up in the puzzles, including one that wasn’t hinted in-game due to a switch around March 15th (I checked that everything important was hinted March 1, then added stuff,) and thanks for those who found the game adequate enough to hit my goal (6.0.)
I think I’m going to write simpler games in the future, though.
Seriously, though, if this comp gave anyone an idea to plan a longer game, (TLDR = do so! Plan ahead!)
As for my game:
[spoiler]4) the stuff I guessed would be the hugest roadblock was all wrong, and lots of the stuff I was perfectionist about wasn’t what players cared about. This is what happens when you make theories without enough data.
5) establish a bug/task reporting/logging site. Dannii Willis pointed me to bitbucket, which can be made private and was a big help de-disorganizing some things.
6) I imagine I drained the well on this game’s mechanic and its possibilities, so no sequel. However, I decided that the name of the series comprising Shuffling Around and A Roiling Original is the “Stale Tales Slate.” I should fix that on IFDB.
7) The antagonist is much more developed now in my notes and in my copy of the game. She is clued early on. I tried not to switch things 2 weeks before release, but I did, from the hydra to the crone. I just found her name out yesterday afternoon, too.
I think this last bit brings up an interesting point–if a game has a big plot hole e.g. “let the player imagine it!” but is playable, is it submittable? Is it a big hole? I have to say I’m forgiving of this, having run into that problem, but others may not be. I’m just glad to have a game, and I’ve read books I loved til the ending and let them slide.[/spoiler]
Anyone interested in bugs (still) in the game can visit this site, which was private til tonight:
bitbucket.org/andrewschultz/a-r … tatus=open
with an OpenID. Drop whatever complaints/issues you want in there, or just see if bitbucket appeals to helping your next project.