Game.Dev Competition screen grabs

I've been trawling the Game.Dev forum looking for my old games to post on my website, a lot of which were done for the regular competition the Game.Dev community ran. While doing so, I took screen grabs of the competition announcements and the results to save for posterity and I thought you might like to see them.

I'd like to do a more comprehensive archive of the competitions that'll be text searchable and include the entry threads as well so that future generations and follow the lines of thought and discussion.

<a href="http://makegamessa.com/discussion/2445/past-game-dev-competition-results">Content has moved here</a>

Comments

  • Wow. Those are some huge screenshots... And now I feel lazy in comparison to how much I was pushing those competitions back then.<br>
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    <p>Nice! It's great to have these all in one spot so we can go back and revisit all that old critique (a critique-al hit, if you will).

    Something seems to've gone awry with the conversion in some of them, though, such as missing headings, or Cyrillic characters like in the gGuardian entry for Comp 17.</p><p>EDIT: Heh. Looking on a PC screen instead of my iPhonitron, I realise they aren't cyrillic characters - they're just regular 'uns that've had their middles shaved off. Same thing that's causing the missing headers and such, methinks.</p>
  • If people are keen I wouldnt mind running competitions like this from the start of next month?<br>
  • Fixed the Comp 17 Results Gazza_N, if anyone finds other faulty screen grabs please let me know and I'll try to fix it (I'm used Awesome Screenshot to capture the web pages which normally works fine but has the odd glitch).
  • Gosh, nice job finding all these. Really amazing to go back and see some of the more unexpected innovative little gems guys pushed out. I was dead impressed by the winner of the Death compo, knew he'd get it the moment I saw it.
  • @edg3: I've been thinking about competitions a lot recently and the major thing that killed them was always the reviews at the end of the judging. I mean, that feedback is one of the things that made the competitions work as well as they did, but it took days to go through everything and write it all up. If we could figure out a way to lighten that load a bit, I think that competitions could easily come back - I'm sure you've noticed how strongly the initial design challenge/constraints influence people deciding to participate :)<br>
  • To the various contestants and especially the winners, I'd like to challenge you re-share your games and post the links here.  <span style="font-size: 10pt; ">Some of the games I tried to download are no longer available or the hosting site has shut-down completely.</span>
  • <font face="Arial, Verdana" size="2">@dislekcia Would it be possible to do a twitter style review process, with "like" counters or something along those lines, to speed through reviews. More detailed reviews could be given to the top 3 contenders maybe. Just a thought.</font>
  • @avanderw The problem is, the top 3 aren't usually the ones who need more in-depth feedback.<br><br>The point of entering these was never to win, it was to try make something given interesting constraints (it's a great way to get the creativity going) and then get detailed feedback on what you did.<br><br>In many ways, I'd say the feedback was probably the *most* important part.<br>
  • The question is / are then...<div><br><div>who is qualified to give feedback?</div><div>what is constructive feedback?</div><div>who should get the most feedback?</div><div>how do you allocate your time in generating feedback?</div><div>how much feedback should you give?</div><div>how do you reduce workload per individual?</div><div><br></div><div>Sorry bit too much wine tonight :)</div></div>
  • <font face="Arial, Verdana" size="2">@avanderw than stop whining ;) (sorry couldn't resist)</font><div style="font-family: Arial, Verdana; font-size: 10pt; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-style: normal; "><br></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Verdana; font-size: 10pt; font-variant: normal; line-height: normal; font-style: normal; "><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-family: 'lucida grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', tahoma, sans-serif; line-height: 18px; text-align: left; "><b>Who is qualified to give feedback?</b> </span>If you can tell a person how they can improve their game by looking at its contents, and giving good, and reasonably implementable advice. I think you would be qualified.</div><div style="font-family: Arial, Verdana; font-size: 10pt; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-style: normal; "><br></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Verdana; font-size: 10pt; font-variant: normal; line-height: normal; font-style: normal; "><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-family: 'lucida grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', tahoma, sans-serif; line-height: 18px; text-align: left; "><b>What is constructive feedback?</b> </span>Constructive feedback is feedback that will help the person make better games.</div><div style="font-family: Arial, Verdana; font-size: 10pt; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-style: normal; "><br></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Verdana; font-size: 10pt; font-variant: normal; line-height: normal; "><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-family: 'lucida grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', tahoma, sans-serif; line-height: 18px; text-align: left; font-size: 10pt; "><b>Who should get the most feedback?</b> </span>I'm not sure anyone <i style="font-weight: normal; ">should</i> get more feedback than anyone else.</div><div style="font-family: Arial, Verdana; font-size: 10pt; font-variant: normal; line-height: normal; "><br></div><div><div style="font-size: 10pt; font-variant: normal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-family: 'lucida grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', tahoma, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 18px; text-align: left; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "><b>How do you allocate your time in generating feedback?</b> Going out on a limb I would say enough time to give good constructive feedback.</div><div style="font-size: 10pt; font-variant: normal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-family: 'lucida grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', tahoma, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 18px; text-align: left; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "><br></div><div style="font-size: 10pt; font-variant: normal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-family: 'lucida grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', tahoma, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 18px; text-align: left; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "><b>How much feedback should you give? </b>Enough that they can make better games, but not so much that they feel overwhelmed.</div><div style="font-size: 10pt; font-variant: normal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-family: 'lucida grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', tahoma, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 18px; text-align: left; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "><br></div><div style="font-size: 10pt; font-variant: normal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-family: 'lucida grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', tahoma, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 18px; text-align: left; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "><b>How do you reduce workload per individual? </b>Many hands make light work, but too many cooks spoil the broth.</div><div style="font-size: 10pt; font-variant: normal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-family: 'lucida grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', tahoma, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 18px; text-align: left; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "><br></div><div style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; text-align: left; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "><font face="lucida grande, Lucida Sans Unicode, tahoma, sans-serif" size="2"><span style="line-height: 18px;">Ultimately if there is a panel of advisor who are each allotted a certain number of games from the competition. The advisors then critique their games and may then critique others if they so choose.</span></font></div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"></div>
  • Yeah, the entire point of the competitions was the feedback. It didn't start out that way, but once I'd run the comps for about a year, I realised that the consistent push to improve through encouraging feedback that didn't pander to anyone was the thing that drove Game.Dev. It took a ton of work keeping the feedback solid, @Karuji's got most of it outlined (we've had long discussions about this in the past) but just to clarify:<br><br>Anyone should be able to give feedback in general. Competition specific feedback should be as consistent as possible, which would be my only issue with lots of people doing the feedback reviews.<br><br>Nobody should get the most feedback - my goal was anyone that submits a playable game should get as much feedback as they can use in the 2 weeks AFTER the competition. The idea being that you don't want to swamp people (so often I'd not talk about smaller issues in games, reasoning that once someone had handled a bigger thing and gotten better, they'd be able to focus on menu layout and shit like that in their next competition game) and they were going to LEARN from this prototype and move on, not sit there and keep working on something for the rest of their lives on the site.<br><br>I think reducing workload is the key thing here: Possibly if everyone reviewed at least one other entry, then voted on the top 3 games and why. This would mean that the competition would have to be even more strongly designed (and trust me, Game.Dev competitions were very heavily thought out in terms of the things they were asking skills wise as well and the stuff they were supposed to be teaching participants through challenge) so that the criteria for success were well understood enough by everyone to keep the reviews and feedback constructive and similar across different writers.<br><br>I'd be keen to try a crowdsourced judging process, maybe we'd even find one or two judging superstars that really loved playing 15 games a month and gave great critique :) But the competition design would be of paramount importance.<br>
  • <font face="Arial, Verdana" size="2">I think you could crowdsource feedback, but rather than the crowd posting it publicly it should be sent to the final judge for collation and a final draft.</font><div style="font-family: Arial, Verdana; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><br></div><div><font face="Arial, Verdana" size="2">The problem is making sure the feedback is constructive towards the objective of the competition (i.e. you've spent the time constructing a competition to teach a particular skill, the feedback should criticize that skill shown) so what about handing out a marking criteria?</font></div><div><font face="Arial, Verdana" size="2"><br></font></div><div><font face="Arial, Verdana" size="2">You could use a site like SurveyMonkey where the crowd can select the game they want to review and then they have 4 or 5 questions to answer, each of which is a line or 2 of comments.  Examples of questions could be:</font></div><div><ul><li><span style="font-family: Arial, Verdana; font-size: small; ">"Is the game 'complete' with a start, game of over - success, game over - failure & restart? What's missing"</span></li><li><span style="font-family: Arial, Verdana; font-size: small; ">"Motivate how the gameplay empathises the theme or lack thereof"</span></li><li><span style="font-family: Arial, Verdana; font-size: small; ">"How could the gameplay be made more intuitive?"</span></li><li><span style="font-family: Arial, Verdana; font-size: small; ">"What should the developer do next to improve the game (besides art & sound)?"</span></li></ul><div><font face="Arial, Verdana" size="2">Carefully constructed at the time the theme is created and competition is announced, the developers (especially newcomers) would have a benchmark to work against, and a greater understanding of the thoughts they should be thinking game designers when building on their game.  You could actually use the questions as a teaching tool.</font></div></div>
  • I like the peer review system on Ludum Dare, but a decent percentage of people that take part dont even bother reviewing the "bare minimum" asked of them (which is 20 or so games?), then there are people that just vote everything bad because they cant run it because they are required to vote for things. When the community is big enough that these people (and Disclaimer: Im not saying we have them) it isnt a problem as the people correctly voting and reviewing will outweigh the people that are cheating the system so to speak. Andre's suggestion to me sounds good as it is a good middleground, we have multiple people giving feedback, and the appropriate feedback that is relevant can be  put together for the final results.
  • I like the idea of having a standard scoring sheet (be it survey monkey / google). With an additional freeform box for additional comments.<div><br></div><div>That way it is similar to the grading system used by educational institutions. I assume that they have similar issues with the time consuming work required in reviewing coursework and exams. Thus, taking from their experience, it might be effective in two ways.</div><div><br></div><div>Firstly, the person being reviewed has targets to achieve and knows how he will be reviewed up front. It provides guides for development and helps to standardise what you would expect to see coming from the game produced.</div><div><br></div><div>Secondly, it will facilitate a speedup with the reviewer. They have a likert-scale (5 point) checklist they can go through. It will mean that everyone gets reviewed similarly and that the reviewer does not need to think about what to review. It will also allow coherence between the different reviewers and allow for new reviewers to get up to speed faster. </div><div><br></div><div>The comment box is where the actual meat can be, as to why the person was scored well / badly in certain areas. A you did this really well because of... or you could have improved this section by...</div>
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    <font face="Arial, Verdana" size="2" style="font-size: 10pt; ">@avandrew I have to strongly disagree with such methodologies.</font><div style="font-family: Arial, Verdana; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><br></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Verdana; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; ">Schools are in fact terrible at evaluating things. Tests see how many fact you can memorize as opposed to what you can work out. I don't think such a thing can be applied to innovation. How would a game like JS Joust fit into such a system? And as I said before you need to adjust your feedback on a per person basis. I wouldn't give a person new to game making the same kind of critique I would to someone like BlackShipsFilltheSky who is an great designer.</div><div style="font-family: Arial, Verdana; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><br></div><div style="font-size: 10pt; "><font face="Arial, Verdana" size="2">Also there should be no standardizing with games. With the competitions on Game.Dev people sometimes barely fell into the theme, and in that they were innovating. We want people to push boundaries; their own and that of making games.</font></div><div style="font-size: 10pt; "><font face="Arial, Verdana" size="2"><br></font></div><div style="font-size: 10pt; "><font face="Arial, Verdana" size="2">Aside from cutting open a person's head and putting in receptors to measure dopamine and serotonin levels how do you give an analytical measure of fun? And then not all games are about fun. Games can be used to facilitate a wide range of emotions: despair, anger, hope, fear, horror, and many many more. You have to look at a game as a whole, what it is trying to do; how well it does that, and what experience you gain from it.</font></div><div style="font-size: 10pt; "><font face="Arial, Verdana" size="2"><br></font></div><div><font size="2">To make a comparison to game reviews. I don't trust reviews that give me a score. Reviews that describe the game it's strengths and flaws without spoiling the play are the best (thank you Rock Paper Shotgun)</font></div>
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    <font face="Arial, Verdana" size="2">@Karuji The suggestion was to allow the peer review to scale better, as @dislekcia pointed out. I agree that standardizing the process will impede innovation, but at least it will allow for reviewing to scale better. Sadly this is the trade-off that is general in most industries. Freedom and innovation is difficult to scale and is extremely wasteful from a efficiency viewpoint. From a pure operations viewpoint, it is always better to standardize a process to improve its efficiency (cost 2 value 2 time trade-off).</font><div><font face="Arial, Verdana" size="2"><br></font></div><div><font face="Arial, Verdana" size="2">It is costly to allow for freedom and innovation which generates a lot of value, but costs in time. I suppose a good middle-ground can be found.</font></div>
  • <div style="text-align: left; "><div><span style="font-size: 10pt; ">At the pressure of @aodendaal </span>and others, I have scoured the wastelands of my backups and returned with 1x copy of the texty-version of Ultimate Quest:</div><div style="font-size: 10pt; "><br></div><div style="font-size: 10pt; ">It's available <a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/upnksubhjb1lwtr/UQ.rar">here</a>, for a measly price of 59 kb. (Requires XNA 1.0, at a slightly less measly <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=2431">2mb</a>, as well as .NET 2.0, which you probably have)</div><div style="font-size: 10pt; "><br></div><div style="font-size: 10pt; ">A cursory examination suggests that I still have most of my games (including all my competition entries and winners), unfinished prototypes, unreleased things, and a stupid JRPG I made in primary school; against all expectations, a quick test or two suggests that most still work! So I may post more later.</div></div>
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