Quote Originally Posted by dazappa
Darn I was getting excited to hear the theme tomorrow -- well at least it's only one day more to wait (currently)... not like 2 weeks. Hate when that happens. Good luck finishing the compo site.

And what do you mean by "There will be some points for the design document."?
Yes, apologies to everyone that was looking forward to the theme release, but I'd rather release the details with as much of the compo site in place as possible.

In terms of points awarded for the design document, its only going to be like 5pts per judge or something like that. It's not going to be a massive amount. But, it could make the difference at the end.

I will say that people do seem to get hung up on the design document when really there is no need. Once the theme is announced I'm pretty sure everyone will have an idea that they want to make a reality... so, this documents purpose is to help you make it a reality. There could be rough ideas about in-game mechanisms, scoring, what determines the end of the game, layouts of screens, controls, how the game progresses and if you want to go for it, even a roughed out project plan or a giant To-Do list. What you include is up to you. I will suggest that design documents are in a rich document format such as MS Word format (everyone can produce a Word document... if you don't have Word, you can get OpenOffice).

People have asked about whether we'll hold them to the design documents... the precedent was set in 2006 I think when at least one competitor completely changed their game because of difficulties with their original concept. That is not a problem, you won't be docked points.

From the other side of the fence, as a judge on the 2007 competition, I found it really interesting reading what people were going to try and do, and I'm sure other competitors did also.