I've renamed the thread to make it more appropriate to the current discussion.

Quote: Original post by Lesan
Here's the thing:

Selecting the Elements

You have an idea about an element that should be present in the game? That element should somehow force the contestants to be considered in the game. It should now be easily implemented into an already existing game. For example, a Pony is a bad element for this purpose, because replacing Horse with Pony is very easy. Distress signal, on the other hand, will alter the gameplay in significant fashion and you cannot easily put Distress signal into an already existing game.

I'd be a bit cautious about picking elements that are a little too specific. Remember you'll have four of these things, so if they're too weird or limiting you might discourage people. In 4E5 and 4E6 I tended to quit early precisely because I could never think of a game idea that used all four elements as core ingredients. I could usually think of a few that had three, but the fourth was always bolted on. (Even if I could have got away with just three, I felt it was improper to not have the fourth).

For example, if the elements happened to be the four nouns I got from a random noun generator (forecast, herring, postage, shock), I'd probably be too weirded out come up with a game. Sure, I could make a silly little game about weathermen who surprise each other with fish through the post, but that's not exactly "four month project" material. [wink]

For the one week game contest I held a couple of years ago, I picked rather vague words that could be taken in many different ways. Mine were taken from tarot mostly, stuff like: The Tower (went with this), Strength, The World, etc. There's a lot of different directions you can take words like that.

Quote: Original post by swiftcoder
Most of the elements from 4e5 (Emblem, Emotion and Economy) guided with out unduly restricting creativity. The last element (Europe) screwed up a lot of good ideas [smile]

In retrospect 4E5 had a pretty decent set of elements, but the change of style from 4E4 threw me for ages. My problem was that I felt it was against the spirit of the competition to not include all four elements as core gameplay components, i.e. if you removed one of them, it would be significantly less of a game. And on top of that, the game idea actually had to sound fun and be somewhat achievable by li'l ol' me within the time frame.

Economy sparked off all the ideas, because it's a quintessential gameplay component. Unfortunately I'd come up with a neat idea for a trading game based on Emotion and get stuck on "...and it's set in Europe, for some reason. And.... there's some sort of Emblem MacGuffin... aw, this sucks." I got really stuck on Emblem; it was hard to make it seem as important as the others.

I eventually came up with a pretty good idea that incorporated all four rather seamlessly, but it was half-way through the contest time and then I was sick for a month, so that scuppered 4E5.

Quote: And as for 4e6, the elements were so specific that I didn't even consider entering...

Me too. I toyed around with ideas for a week, but they were all royally stupid. Crystals were dead easy to make a core component, but the rest made for some horribly blatant insertions. Every idea felt like... "here's a game. With Crystals! And Ponies! And Accountants! And Explosions!" No cohesion between the elements at all.

Great to see you picked this up Lesan!
It will be very likely that I'll join the contest, not sure yet how likely it is I'll submit an entry (but currently I'm determined to do so!).

I quickly skimmed over the things that were said already in this topic.

As for the elements:
I think it would be nice to have some more abstract elements such as `distress signal'. However, it should be combined with the regular elements such as `mobile phone' or `tower'.

The name of the contest:
I suggest something like `4 elements, community edition' (if the use of `4 elements' is ok with gamedev.net). That could be abbreviated as 4E-CE for example.

Judging:
I think contenders (and those who are just interested) can do the judging. There are (currently) no prices, so preventing judging biases is not that crucial. As somebody else already said: the judging is just the top on the ice. There are probably also some judging schemes possible that prevent a bias. I think it would be great to have different categories in which you can win:

- technical (how stable is the game, does it utilize hardware well)
- graphical (might be merged with technical)
- integration of the elements
- fun to play
- polished (how easy is installation, how good/complete is the manual, extra options in game like having a level editor for example, scalability over different hardware/os'es)

If we're gonna have community judges, we need a nice judging form as well that can be filled in for each game. It should contain some information fields that have to be filled in:

- "what are the strong points of this game" (open answer)
- "what are its weak points" (open answer)
- "do you consider the graphics"
a. excellent
b. good
c. reasonable
d. below average
e. weak
- "how do you feel that element A/B/C/D is integrated in the game"
a. good
b. ok
c. forced into it

Time period:
Six months is ok, four or five months would also be ok for me. Not shorter and not longer I think. There should be a time period for judging as well. I think a month (that is after the 4/5/6 month period) would be an appropriate time frame for that. Starting end of October would be great.

Rules:
The rules listed on your website look ok to me. A cpu somewhat faster than 2.0Mhz would be nice though ;). Perhaps you should allow MacOSX entries as well (however, maybe just forget about it unless somebody shows up who actually wants to create an entry for MacOSX).

Thats about it for now what I can think off. I think I have some time to create a form that could be used for judging (even if only used as a base to start from).