The site could set a cookie with a timestamp when a game was downloaded, and check that at voting time. Not a perfect solution (and I wouldn’t want to be responsible for coding it) but it would give some data.
I’m not sure disallowing updates during the last week of competition is a great idea. It seems as though we should either go all in or not at all, otherwise the update window could be viewed simply as a beta-testing period. (Granted, arguably the competition could already be considered just one long beta-testing round because of the updates.)
Another option we have is to designate the first week of competition, or the week previous, as a testing week. All entries need to be completed, and everyone has access to the games, but all comments are directed back to the authors, and nothing is made public. Then everyone can play the revised games when the Comp officially begins, with no more updates. Perhaps most players won’t want to participate in the testing period. Of course, this would mean players would need to play some games twice, which is probably not desirable. Still, offering a sneak peek at a few games for those who are interested might work.
Neil
I suggested something similar in a previous thread - have the first half of the comp as allowing updates and the second half disallowing them - but nobody seemed to like the idea much. For me it’d seem like the best of both worlds: the people in favour of updates get to update the games to their heart’s content during the first half of the comp, and the people against have a full half of the comp in which no updates are allowed. But as I said, nobody else seemed to like the idea much.
Maybe there should be an option so you can receive a mail notification when some games are updated. So you don’t have to check the page and scroll to that game to know.
I guess the closest thing right now is following the authors on FB/Twitter, right?
Something else came to mind about testing.
In the early days of the comp, one could expect a limited amount of entries (~20-30; the only year that came close to today’s volume of entries was 2000, if I recall correctly) and the community was, for better or worse, more centralized – pretty much just raif and ifMUD. This made testers much easier to find. Since then, the number of entries has near-doubled, the community has spread to many more venues, a couple of the prior beta-testing forums have shuttered (if.game-testing.org comes to mind), and the comp sees many more formats with their own testing needs and standard Things That Usually Go Wrong. While authors can and should self-test to some extent, this is no substitute for outside beta testers. But beta testers work for free. In some cases, they do a lot of work for free. And while it’s very fortunate that we have people wiling to do this work for free, their time is not an unlimited resource, and at some point the volume of entries is going to exceed the supply of willing testers.
Arguably that point is pretty close. Anecdotally speaking: I had a small pile of testers in 2009. When I returned looking for testers in 2015 for Synfac I had another small pile, but the vast majority of them were friends, colleagues or people who’d tested my prior stuff; I posted in all the usual testing channels recommended, but got few bites. (At least 50% of my testers came from a closed Facebook status I posted.) This is from someone with some amount of name recognition and XYZZYs under my belt; I imagine it must be harder for newcomers.
The other day, the ifcomp site, perhaps as a side effect of another internal change, started linking the “Play Online” button to my game’s hints page (detectiveland-hints.html) instead of the game itself (index.html), despite it working normally before that. The game was unplayable for several hours before a player told me about it. Apparently the site’s behaviour had changed (this is my guess) to serve the first HTML file it found in the root folder of the game, rather than automatically choosing index.html.
I moved the hints page into a subfolder and reuploaded, without changing any game content, and it worked again. I gather some other games had similar problems. So please know that at least some of the updates have been made to fix problems that were not of authors’ own making.
(Yes, I’ve done a couple of other updates to fix bugs caused by my own oversight, too.)
Yes, this was a last-minute change in the site behavior. The fact that it changed your game’s behavior was a mistake. I believe that was fixed, but after you changed your game layout.
(I didn’t do it, I just see the changes go by in the repository. github.com/jmacdotorg/ifcomp/pull/65 in this case.)
Cool. Thanks for clearing it up, and thanks for all the work you all put in - I didn’t mean to sound complainy.
Different update strategies have been tried. Two years ago they tried only allowing updates to happen during a one-day window each weekend. The consensus was that it was more hassle for the organizers to flip the switch on and off on a schedule than it was just leave updates turned on the whole time.
Here’s a potentially interesting option (which has probably been suggested in various formats):
*Intents due a month before Beta Deadline.
*Beta Deadline: Games are released on site singly for a “public beta” period. Voting is not opened yet. Players/voters/reviewers can get a 2-3 week head start on games while providing private author feedback and writing reviews. Reviews can be held until the final versions of games are released as desired. Authors help each other beta test furiously. Authors still have option to withdraw based on feedback if they need to.
*Final Entry Deadline: (2-3 weeks later) Final versions of games due. Updates are closed. Games are frozen on site, and the cumulative zip of the whole comp collection is released with “final” versions of everything. Voting opens. People who only want to play the final polished version of games would begin their comp here. Lots of reviews released along with big public media extravaganza push to play games.
*Voting Deadline: (2-3 weeks later) Votes closed and tallying happens. New award categories for authors: Best Beta-Tester, Best Reviewer.
*Results Announced.
Yes, this is my bad, and I made it worse by not publicly acknowledging the problem immediately. (Due to distraction more than intent, but that’s how it fell out anyway.)
I have just now posted an acknowledgment of and apology for the outage on the IFComp blog: blog.ifcomp.org/post/15166718146 … nd-briefly
I like the idea of having “helper elves” like in Spring Thing. That helped me squash a few bugs I probably should’ve zapped if I’d given myself more time. Details are spoilered as it means a lot of work for the organizer.
[spoiler]Obviously this is a volunteer thing but it’d be a good way for former authors, or people who missed the deadline, to contribute. And people without a lot of resources in the community would have one. It’s a lot of programming and organizational work, but it seems worth it. Perhaps game-testing.org’s templates could help match testers up with their games.
As for best beta-tester/reviewer, I think I do best at testing when I don’t worry about that sort of thing. Maybe people who’ve helped with any games get a mention, and X games get special gold stars,
Best Beta-Tester would be a neat reward but I’m not sure how to evaluate it. Maybe authors could have a cluster of points to hand out or something? For instance, how does someone fixing 10 bugs in #1 vs 10 bugs in a middle of the pack weigh? Cases could be made for more, less, or equal.
Perhaps we’d be best off with just giving people check marks for stuff fixed and enough bugs = an honorable mention.[/spoiler]
The comp zip used to be updated. If you joined after a few weeks and downloaded it, you would be up-to-date instead of 3 weeks out.
Too short it needs 3 months if you haven’t even started when you submit the intent.
With the number of testers declining and the number of authors rising, authors doing most testing is the only feasible solution. With authors taking over testing, the beta phase can be private (as authors prefer) with just some registered betatesters each getting a pool of games to help to spread expert help evenly. CON: a private beta phase would be low profile, authors could miss it.
I don’t like reviews based on betas, radical changes are still possible at this stage.
I like a shorter voting/angsting period. 2 weeks is short enough to stay exciting every day with no lull in the middle. I would add a maximum number of votes; at first 20 then 10 then 5 in subsequent competitions. It’s better to have more voters than more votes; voter growth will replace the votes.
With this arrangement there is limited public feedback.
Are you saying authors would vote on these categories? There would be the usual pitfalls for voting on people rather than products. The products of testing are dense and difficult to evaluate. But I like the idea of the public voting on the best review. We could vote on the top 10 most nominated reviews in the last week or after the voting period.
EDIT: Added link for best review nominations thread.
I won’t say I’m not guilty of submitting an intent at the deadline and starting a game from scratch, but having to know three months in advance basically closes off the option for an entire quarter year. I think having a month advance prevents spontaneous last minute 'what the hell" submissions and gives authors reasonable time to be sure they will have the entry complete or withdraw.
You’d be surprised how quickly a lot of canonical IF games were written. No, not the ones you think are ruining IF.
I don’t doubt that at all. Especially if the entire game is planned out ahead of time. Slapping code into Inform is not the hard part. What takes the longest (at least for me) is if the game scope and concept isn’t solidly nailed down and I’m making it up as I go along. That’s where spontaneous ideas unplanned systems can start clashing if the author hasn’t first conceived how they will interact with each other completely.
(And personally, I don’t have any examples of games I “think are ruining IF”. I’m not sure to what or whom that was directed.)
Well, recently, I and other authors who use limited verb sets for particular effect have been told we “should do CYOA instead of corrupting parserland.”
More broadly, this has been and is the thrust of a lot of anti-Twine sentiment. (And choice in general, but usually it’s a bit more specific.) The “you” was general.
The “intent to submit” deadline is not supposed to be the moment where you start writing the game. That’s not what it’s for. Start writing the game when you need to in order to submit it by the end of September.
Yes, I wrote “Shade” in a month. The comp schedule is not based on that fact.
I had a couple other pieces in mind besides Shade, but that certainly is another example of a game generally considered excellent done in what would seem like a reasonably short amount of time. Gestation time is a pretty poor indicator of quality, as it turns out.