Some interesting ideas and thoughts here.

The stage system is in place, but allows for any amount of stages/deadlines, from just 1 up to any 11 digit number, if so needed. (but I doubt that you'll see anything more than a double digit number) and also you can have any number of deadline goals too. It's all up to the rule-makers of the next PGD Annual.

It will of course maintain a gameplay theme... and be different from previous years. So I guess you can count out 'head to head or direct player vs player' and 'bosses and levels/stages'... But thats all I can predict being almost a whole 5 months ahead of the time to start really thinking about it.

Open source vs closed source is interesting... we decided to do closed because we wanted to see the reaction to offering closed sources. And I sort of felt that to offer the game up to the IGF in the hopes that the game would find an interested publisher there and/or 'make it' as a hugely successful commercial game (with it's obvious indie origins) it would help to have the sourcfe hidden to make this more possible for them.

These things should be carefully considered in the future, since the PGD Annual and the success of winning and popularizing your game is that it attracts this kind of commertial attention. And you can't sell what you've given away. So that might be one of the modivators of doing entering and doing all this in the first place. Who doesn't want to make video games for a living, right?


One idea I had pondered since after the first one... was that in time we could eventually expant the PGD Annual event and include smaller side competitions in addition to the main one. The Developmental Excellence Awards would still be offered to all competitions, but instead of going into the long competition [size=9px](16 weeks this year, 10.5 weeks in 2005)[/size] it would give the option of then instead doing a much smaller one with a lighter theme and set of goals to complete.

This would be great for offering those that are looking for smaller competitions and those that really liked the 3-4 month big race to create the next great 'Doomafied' success per-say. Prizes would be smaller than the main competition, but thats only because of the scale of the main competition it's self.

This concept of course requires heavily on sponsorship, the judges and their time and available effort. It may be possible to gain judges from the sponsors themselves saving the need to put poor full-time workin' stiffs like Dean Ellis and Eric Grange to work for us and making them slave over hours of unpaid testing and game playing. [size=9px](I guess it helps that games typically are fun, no? )[/size]

I believe that GDNet does this with some of their competitions. It might work for us too in some respects. Perhaps having them judge the main event and leaving the side competitions to the part-timers.

It's something that I think I may propose to Dom for next year... but my doubts about being involved in the management of PGD for the main portion of 2007 still remains unlikely. Time will tell...

At least I got to enjoy the 2006 PGD Annual.