Contest ideas for next year

[michalis]

I'm after requiring open-source. I said this in the old thread when this year's competition started... but some people answered that they just don't want to go open-source. I think that at least some significant points should be rewarded for being open-source.

As for being multiplatform, I agree with Daniel: it should be rewarded wth points. Judges will probably have to limit the possible platforms that "count" anyway, surely these platforms that "count" should at least include Win32 and Linux/i386.

1) All content (e.g. textures, music, models, etc) should be procedurally generated. In other words, we take our cue from the European demo makers.

That's interesting idea... But requiring *everything* to be procedural could make things too limiting, after all the "demos" are often pretty far from what we usually call normal "playable" games. I would rather allow textures and music and creature/object models to be stored in a normal way, but require procedural *levels* instead. This could make interesting fun to develop good level generator and make a game based on it...

[Huehnerschaender]

I like the idea about a contest which is about randomly generated levels.

[jdarling]

Bonus points for cross platform is a good idea, but the benifit does need to be small (50 points is about right on a 1000 point scale). This adds some real qualities to the cycle. Companies that do cross platform, get a little bit of gain (if they do it right).

Also the point for Open-Source points is a good one. This though should be a higher percentage of the points (IMHO). I think of it this way, if someone wants to enter into the compo but doesn't want their source displayed to the world then I wonder what/why/who they did wrong. Worse yet, what they are going to do to my system .

In my scenario, something like 200 "Bonus" points could be awarded:
100: Open-Source
50: Multi-Platform
50: Size limitations (thus procedural generated stuff would get this if done right)

My only problem with a contest based around procedural generation is that I'm not sure how many people we would completely put out with the idea. Getting on a team this year was near impossiable if you didn't know anyone (I know I tried early on before I started my own). New developers may or may not have the time/knowledge/wits to pickup procedural methodology and make it work.

On MUDDs and MMORPGs; I see this as more of a long time running compo. It is a great idea, but you would have to take almost a year (if not more) and have detailed rules, regs, and a great deal of support hardware. This is even to judge the entries. If you place the blame of running the hardware on the entrants, they may not have the money to put up such a beast. Remember that most MMORPGs and MUDDs are server heavy beasts. I'm up for the compo, but I think it should be held seperately from the PGD anual.

Of course I still stand by the Stage Goals!

Just my two cents to try and keep the ideas going, I can't wait for next years compo .

[Zenophran]

Procedural content sounds interesting, but I don't know the first thing about doing it. Are there any tutorials on it? I admit to not searching first, but just trying to get a feel for how many people out there are up to speed on the techniques.

I like jdarling's bonus point idea (and agree on the milestones/stage goals).

[dmantione]

I came to the conclusion that a big bonus for open source won't work. The reason is the open/closed source is a decision, and the bonus would therefore be based on decision instead of the work the team did.

Near the higher places, a 100 points bonus might sound reasonable for having source code. Near the bottom, 100 points means really a lot, I could image it could mean five places higher in the ranking. As I believe judging should primarily be about the game and not about the license, this is too much influence.

[Zenophran]

Another option is to have two categories, open and closed source. I guess it really depends on what the competition is about. Is it purely promoting the fact that pascal is a capable language for coding games, or is it for promoting the use of pascal to code games?

If it's the latter, then an open source idea would be far more useful. Perhaps the entries could be dual judged - "Complete Game" and "Complete Game as a Tutorial"? This could extend to design docs, etc. Teams could choose not to enter a category if they wish.

Just a suggestion...

[WILL]

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.