Quote: The problem with a really long contest is that you'll most likely not get that many entrants.

I like and participate in Four Elements contests because they're that long. If I were to succeed in a one-week contest, I'd have to code my game many hours. However, in a long-term contest, I have plenty of time and when creating my game gets boring, I simply take a one-month break and then I continue on.

Quote: About the judging.

I don't think a system of attributing a score on a scale (0-10) to each game by everyone would work. Many people would assign scores like "Hm... I don't like FPS games and I was not in good mood to play today. I give ... hm ... 4.3 points."
It could be a good idea to assign points in categories (like the current judging system does) or to demand an explicit text explanation of why a judge awarded the points the way he did.

Quote: Overall.

But I like Four Elements contest and I'm also disappointed by its decline.
However, to continue the Four Elements contest, it is neccessary to have someone of the GD to participate in the lead, which would bring the dependance on a single person. If 4e is not going to continue, I think we could/should make an (extremely) similar contest to continue the tradition of 4e.

Quote: I don't think a system of attributing a score on a scale (0-10) to each game by everyone would work. Many people would assign scores like "Hm... I don't like FPS games and I was not in good mood to play today. I give ... hm ... 4.3 points."
It could be a good idea to assign points in categories (like the current judging system does) or to demand an explicit text explanation of why a judge awarded the points the way he did.

Yeah. I found it hard to assign arbitrary points to games, and ended up using the current judging system in my own thread. Still, I left a buffer at the end of about four points to handle other good and bad things about the game that I hadn't already counted in my evaluation.

That said, judging isn't that hard. It doesn't even take that much time. A weekend with some free time, or a couple hours after work for three days, and you'll be able to judge something like the 4E entries, very fully and completely. Getting judges might be hard, I don't know. If the 4E contests are any judge, it's apparently impossible to force them to return results.

I'm in favor of relatively simple systems (+1 if you like it, 0 if you don't care, -1 if you despise it), then aggregate it together and you have a score. As long as you have a decent number of judges, you get a nice spread. If you don't have a lot of judges, you just have X rounds where each round only takes the top quarter of the previous round.

Of course, it isn't as evil as the psychological tests my old company used to give. To rate something +1 you were requires to give something a -1. Handled the curve nicely though.

Quote: Original post by dmoonfire
I'm in favor of relatively simple systems (+1 if you like it, 0 if you don't care, -1 if you despise it), then aggregate it together and you have a score. As long as you have a decent number of judges, you get a nice spread.

Well, I disagree on the voting/grades thing. If you invite folks to spend months on a project, the least you can do is to provide them with some useful feedback. To me personally that would be a bigger draw than even the 4e4 & 4e5 prizes, which were considerable. The scores used in 4e4 didn't quite cut it. In 4e5 the critics were pretty hard on our little game, but still the fact that they actually gave feedback that time around was very much appreciated.

As a game development community site, part of the goal is to help people further themselves and as such I think some feedback from the judges should be plain mandatory. It's not like they need to turn out a full-blown review, but a few paragraphs describing what was good, what was bad and an overall impression of the game goes a very long way... Even when it downright slaughters the game [grin]

But of course it's easy for me to shout from the sideline, at least Avatar God made a valiant effort in rating the games nonetheless (missed it, but great job!).

Quote: how many people are willing to join another current style 4E contest?

4e4 rocked, in 4e5 the elements were sketchy and 4e6 somehow completely dropped below the radar on me. I dunno, prizes aren't everything but at least the 4e4 and 4e5 ones gave the contest a higher profile and purpose. Of course, there's also stuff like Dream Build Play and some other (XNA) contests they have to compete with now. The time investment that goes into a long-term contest should be worth it, either in terms of prizes, solid feedback or prestige. Sadly I'm not sure 4e lives up to that.


That's just my 2 uninformed cents though, I don't think I deserve to complain since I missed out on 4e6 completely [smile]

Quote: Original post by remigius
Even when it downright slaughters the game [grin]

[sad]

Seems like so long ago, but it was fun working with you Rim [cool]

Quote: Original post by ViLiO
Seems like so long ago, but it was fun working with you Rim [cool]

Yeah, it seems ages past but it was fun indeed [smile]

For all its flaws, I gave the game another spin a while back and the mechanics we managed to come up with were actually pretty fun in retrospect. It just could have used a bit lot more polish. Maybe if they run out of ideas over at your place, I'd be up for licensing our IP [wink]

Quote: Original post by TheFlyingDutchman
Besides that, to avoid bad ratings, you could also ask the judges only to judge a game if they played it for at least a half hour (put also a question about playing time in the judging form). Of course you can't check this, but I think it will help anyway to increase the level of judging.

It's absolutely necessary. The really long games in this contest got at least one hour of play from me, and the really short ones got played through several times. Without that, you'll miss the real draw and thrill of some of the games, though you would also miss some poor polish. In other cases, a game can lose its appeal totally after more than a few minutes, and the scores need to reflect that.

The 4E contests used to say one hour, and it seems like a good rule.

Bah, I did miss that in my explanation (+1, 0, -1). I was assuming it was for every scoreable category. Its harder to say 1-5 where you can say "like", "hate", "whatever", but I do think the categories is nice (and critical for long projects).

Having a full and proper critique is also very nice, and probably the part that makes it the hardest for getting a judge. I tried that with the TIG's PGC competition, a paragraph per game really adds up on time (and I got burned out somewhere around #12).

But, just opinions, I bombed out of 4E6 (got much further though) and if there is a 4E7, I'll probably join it also. :)

I also happen to be a Linux user primarily (one reason I was kicking for the cross-platform prize). But, I didn't mind the Windows focus.