The question I want to ask is: "What are the plans for Make Games competitions in 2015, if any."
A little bit of a preamble: When I was an freshly minted amateur game developer (aspiring towards a career in game development) I came across the Game.Dev forums that were hosted by NAG. I met a really rad bunch of people there, many of which I consider dear friends today, but what I was really confronted by was a culture of making things together and collaborative learning. This was most evident in the monthly competitions held at Game.Dev, where people would be working on a common goal (albeit in competition) and so really be able to learn from each other. For a while I believe this fostered a really positive creator culture and accelerated the skillsets of some of developers who came out of that (including my own).
I mention this just to motivate why I'm particularly fond of local competitions when held in a community like this.
But I know running competitions takes a TON of time, and often is kind of thankless work (or at least, the time investment is disproportionate to the thanks).
I'd like to offer some of my time this year, if I can help, to having some competitions.
So:
What are the plans for Make Games competitions in 2015, if any.
And:
What does the community feel about competitions? (I'm sure not everyone sees them like me).
A little bit of a preamble: When I was an freshly minted amateur game developer (aspiring towards a career in game development) I came across the Game.Dev forums that were hosted by NAG. I met a really rad bunch of people there, many of which I consider dear friends today, but what I was really confronted by was a culture of making things together and collaborative learning. This was most evident in the monthly competitions held at Game.Dev, where people would be working on a common goal (albeit in competition) and so really be able to learn from each other. For a while I believe this fostered a really positive creator culture and accelerated the skillsets of some of developers who came out of that (including my own).
I mention this just to motivate why I'm particularly fond of local competitions when held in a community like this.
But I know running competitions takes a TON of time, and often is kind of thankless work (or at least, the time investment is disproportionate to the thanks).
I'd like to offer some of my time this year, if I can help, to having some competitions.
So:
What are the plans for Make Games competitions in 2015, if any.
And:
What does the community feel about competitions? (I'm sure not everyone sees them like me).
Comments
I'd also like to say that I'd also be willing to give my time to help in organising competitions.
Here's why the competitions don't happen anymore:
1. Finding a theme takes time! Just throwing out a theme is easy. Finding a theme that addresses a game-design issue that the majority of the forum is struggling with (if you don't get this right, people won't talk to each other about their games) is hard. Finding a theme that does that AND still allows room for people to be creative with it, AND that is conducive to actually finishing something in 2 weeks of part time work (the median amount of time people seemed to find to work on their games) - that takes considerably longer. In some cases I felt like the themes I was suggesting for competitions weren't very good anymore, probably because I didn't want to re-do previous comps, although thinking about that it totally makes sense with the new community. I dunno.
2. Judging takes much longer than anything else. This is the major thing I don't have time for. The comps worked because of the feedback: Every entry got something encouraging out of it, maybe one or two things to work on, maybe a knowing wink or a nudge for trying something really cool... It wasn't just about finding the time to play 20 games in a month so that I could rank them against each other - the ranking was completely secondary and I'd only point out the top 3 anyway and do honourable mentions or anything else to try and keep people's spirits up. It was about introducing constructive criticism in a way that empowered people to make more cool stuff. I'd spend nights trying to come up with a way to word something to encourage someone despite the fact that I was pointing out how their game didn't really work all that great. This actually gets harder when more people are better at making stuff, being positive about someone's first game is pretty easy. Even stuff like the timing of the feedback to be just before the next competition started was designed to be maximally encouraging - give people about a week to think about the feedback, then give them the next set of constraints when they're just about ready to do something else...
3. I have other things that I do. I run a company, I judge games in the IGF, I try to make my own stuff... Running the comps totally killed my own prototyping for 4 years. That's a problem.
4. Other competitions exist. There are game jams all the time now, for some reason people don't feel comfortable entering these the same way they did local comps. Or if they do, they rarely set up threads to discuss their games and gather feedback from forumites the same way that the local comps made the forum explode with prototypes each time... I suspect that has to do with the shortened time of a typical jam: You don't want to be updating a thread when you only have a weekend to make something... But I strongly suspect that the whole "this is a game in progress, play it and we'll make it better together" positive community feedback loop is a little bit damaged by how people tend to post games they're mostly "done with" after a game jam ends. The thing is: jams aren't the only things available - there are initiatives like 1GAM and other longer-period competitions that would expose more local teams to international devs and press. I spend a lot of time worrying about the weird isolationism that seems rampant here in SA and I feel like having local, exclusionary comps runs counter to trying to get local devs to be more active internationally... Again, I dunno here. Part of me doesn't want to encourage local isolationism, part of me understands that newbies don't want to go against "international pros" right off the bat (and yes, that's a very wrong attitude, but it's how people starting out often see things).
Stuff we'd need to fix to have local comps again:
1. Nuking the post editing window. Srsly, this is a big deal: People need to be able to edit their first post in a thread to always link to the most recent version of their game. This is a technique that emerged out of 4 years of testing as 100% essential.
2. Judging needs to be spread out somehow. It has to embrace the ethos of just me doing the "judging". It has to not cost me a million units of time - especially if the competitions get BIGGER. It needs to involve other people, but not be about rankings, which is what that often turns into. The IGF judging/jury process is amazing, but focused on rankings eventually - it also takes MONTHS. Maybe we build a queue of stuff that needs to get "official" feedback (I'm pretty uncomfortable with that label these days, BTW) or maybe there's a format for constructive criticism on a game and the best post on a thread entry to try and "judge" that game gets picked and elevated to the final say...
3. The whole local/international thing needs to be addressed. Maybe we do local layers over international competitions: each game gets the same sort of thread here for an international comp as it would have for a local comp; we post start-end announcements of international things here; we give entries "local" feedback and results. I dunno... That's a lot of maybe.
4. We need a repository for comp entries and results to go to. This is one of the biggest failings from the old Game.Dev comps: Outside of some Dev.Mag articles, they're mostly gone now. We also need some sort of guide for hosting files, uploading images, making videos, etc.
So yeah, I'd love to have comps again because I feel they improve the critical environment of the forum immensely, I just have a lot of other stuff I need to do. Help would be good.
Comp 22: Genre Benders!
Stop. Sit down. Clear your mind.
Let your preconceptions about games fade. Cast them into a pool before you, watching the ripples die down to nothing.
Breathe.
Now imagine Grand Theft Auto as a text-adventure. Starcraft as an puzzle-platformer. Ultima as a turn-based strategy. Perhaps even Zork as a card game. Breathe. Let those ideas bubble, sulfurous, in your pool. What else comes to the surface?
Your challenge is to take a game you know and re-generate it in a different genre. Of course, this happens with successful licenses all the time - Various video games have been turned into board games or rethunk to work on mobile devices, but what if you go one step further and actively flirt with the ridiculous?
Turn Pong into a boardgame. Try to figure out how that might work. Toy with odd, obscure genres and games that feel like they truly "couldn't be anything else". Often it's exactly that kind of creative tomfoolery that results in the innovations that drive the industry. How do you solve the problems that crop up when turning Tetris into an alternate reality game?
Not only do you have to be creative, but you have to understand the game you're starting from inherently. That's never a bad thing... One word of warning though: Just because you're taking existing games and transplanting them into new genres they've never dreamed about being in, doesn't mean that you can steal their IP. Fair use is fair use, but stealing artwork is never ok. Plus, if the original IP holder has a problem with your work (most won't, but some might) step away gracefully. Other than that, have fun! I'm really excited to see what this concept produces!
Re-imagine a game you know and love in as alien a genre as possible.
Rules:
- Competition starts on June 1st 2009, 01-06-2009.
- Deadline for entries is July 1st 2009, 01-07-2009.
- The use of copyrighted material will not be tolerated. Do not steal!
- Use whichever language, tool or development system you are comfortable in. Downloading and using Game Maker is recommended for beginners and for prototyping. - If you make a board or card game, give us something to print out, cut up and play! (you can assume that we have dice)
- Ask for help when you get stuck.
- Your game must contain all files needed for it to run and should not require other bulky systems to be downloaded or installed, exceptions are browser plugins like Flash and self-contained dlls distributed with the game).
- Your final entry must include a readme.txt that EXPLAINS THE CONTROLS, RULES and any other information you want to get across to your users.
- Competition is open to entry for South African citizens, current residents of South Africa and South African passport holders.
- The judges' decision is final and no negotiation will be entered into. All risk or liability in case of copyright infringement or other legal issue resides with the entrant, Game.Dev and NAG take no responsibility for entered games.
Entering:To enter the competition, start a thread titled "22: <NameOfOriginalGame> as a <NewGenre>" (Example, "22: Pong as a boardgame") and post your design ideas and game releases there. As you release files, edit your first post to point to the most recent versions available.
Other people WILL reply to your post with their feedback and ideas, it's a fact that games that allow forumites to give their feedback do better in competitions. Please report any offensive comments to me for moderation. Consider releasing your source code, it helps us pinpoint problems that you might be having and benefits the community as a whole.
You may enter multiple games if you wish and can handle the workload.
Advice:
Be as odd and alien as you can. The Pong as a board game example was designed to make you go "What, how?" try to answer that question. The more interesting the game's disconnects with a certain genre, the more you'll learn about playability and mechanics.
Seriously, go wild. Pitch a bunch of ideas and see what you could turn into something fun, often the fun is of the "I can't believe we're doing this" variety.
Read up on german boardgames, accessibility in games and try to think about different ways that you can express what a game is trying to do by understanding its fundamental principles: Tetris is about position, so if we can track position on phones reasonably accurately via GPS, why not assign different phones a specific piece and let them control that piece by moving around in a space. Maybe the level locks up, maybe it doesn't. But it'd be fun to mill about with a bunch of other people all playing Tetris pieces... Just hope you get the L-shaped block. It's the best.
...
Good luck and enjoy the competition. I'm hoping that it's as much fun to make a genre-bending game as it is to come up with the wackiest examples possible :)
Comp 22 Results: Genre Benders!
Ask any gamer to imagine their favorite games cross-dressing as different genres and you'll have yourself an entertaining waste of an afternoon. Turn that into a drinking game somehow and you'll have some of the best ideas that nobody can remember ("Hey! What about Bejewelled as a drinking game! You'd have a grid of colourful shooters...") and probably the most fun hangover ever. There would probably be rules to where and how you could feel bad and an inexplicable set of text parser puzzles to solve. These things happen.
Ask the Game.Dev forum regulars to do the same thing and you get this ton of stuff to play through. Each one a fragment of a parallel universe where Team 17 were german boardgame designers, Valve had paper instead of the Source engine or Cliffy_B grew up a hikkikomori instead of a disco pirate with a scanner.
Then you have to judge them... Well, I do. You can, but mine's better. Whatever. Those of you that are boring and want to go straight to the results and play the top 3, click here.
REVIEWS:
Alien vs Predator: The Dating Sim - Nandrew
If you're anything like me, you've asked yourself what it would be like to french kiss a Predator. AvP: The Dating Sim is as close as you're ever about to get without raiding Arnie's secret diaries. Surprisingly enough, the game has you assume the role of an extremely sexually liberated Marine in search of hearts with either a fellow Marine (ooh) an Alien (ahh) or a Predator (eep - and probably illegal). Once you pick an *ahem* target, you are presented with no more than three dialogue choices at a time with which to woo them. In the ancient tradition of dating sims everywhere, certain choices have a positive effect on your would-be fanfic fodder whilst others send you on a one way trip to heartache-ville. Or death. Dating in the future is dangerous!
The object of your affection's current emotional state is shown via state of the art pheromone tech. If you don't have a functioning Jacobson's organ, you're going to have to make do with various forms of super sarcastic smiley as your only entertainment. That and that razor sharp wit that permeates every single glorious status update or corny dialogue choice. If you've ever enjoyed Alien vs Predator ANYTHING and simultaneously enjoy laughing, this game represents ten minutes of your life well spent.
DDR the top-down shooter - SkinkLizzard
While certainly a creative blend of genres and the game itself being eminently playable, the combination of DDR matching mechanics and a dodge-based shooter don't gel with the elegant simplicity that either of their progenitors are known for. You're told to dodge explosive arrows (or moves, as the game calls them) and can switch the type of ammo you fire to counter each type. Incorrectly matching ammo and a move results in health loss on par with simply flying into the explosive little bugger.
Here's why it feels odd: The rules concerning what you can shoot don't feel kinesthetically constrained the way DDR's arrow pads clearly are; Plus you tend to spend a lot of your time cycling through different types of shot while herding clumps of moves. Perhaps if the game simply tied movement to the cursor and allowed you to fire the 4 different types of ammo with the corresponding WASD keys, or if it gave you a sequence of shots that you had to fire in order with no switching, it would feel more in tune. There's also little to no rhythm element to the gameplay, which is a real shame - rhythm-based shooters are a small but really enjoyable genre, the world could do with more of them.
That said, the game does handle the task of giving the player feedback on their continuous mode switching very well and you're never left wondering exactly what ammo you're going to fire and you know when something went well or badly for you. It's also just a little odd that a game with DDR as an inspiration doesn't use the DDR arrow configuration (which starts with left instead of up).
Fallout: EezeE-Wasteland Outpost Creation Kit - Aval4nche
Fallout has already gone through somewhat of a metamorphosis already: Transitioning from tactical, turn-based RPGs into an FPS/RPG hybrid with Fallout 3. Aval4nche wondered what would happen if the game went through yet another phase-change, this time into the management genre.
You're tasked with re-establishing civilisation out in the Capitol City wastes after being disgorged by your vault. Unfortunately civilisation requires a ready supply of food (via Brahmin farms), places for people to live, protection from marauding raiders and an all-important place to do science. Because without science, where would we be? That's as far as the game has really gotten: You build up a bit of an outpost and then bloody dogs gnaw your carefully run farms to pieces. Sniper towers help until the supermutants arrive, but eventually you're overrun... Perhaps that's a statement about the futility of survival after nuclear war, or maybe it's just a symptom of me getting confused by the interface. Either way, it's certainly one of the cooler concepts of the competition: Who doesn't want to run a wasteland town, stockpiling bottle caps so that you can buy enough mercs to wipe the grins off those smug bastards over in Megaton?
Gears of War: The Minesweeper! - Nandrew
Starting out our trifecta of Gears of War re-imaginings (Hah! I've always wanted to use that word) in this competition is perhaps the most abstract of them all: Play Marcus and our lovable Delta Squad heroes as though their entire world was... A Minesweeper game?
To be fair, there aren't really mines that need to be defused. Instead you have to dispatch Locusts that the game gives you two sets of information about: Each square revealed tells you how many Locusts neighbor it and the colour of a square tells you the most powerful type of Locust nearby. Clicking on a known "mine" square doesn't end your game, you end the Locust and take damage according to the type of Locust you've just curb-stomped. Drones don't hurt too much, but Boomers and Elite Guards take a concerted jab at the crimson omen that represents your closeness to death. Explore squares that aren't Locust infested and your health regenerates. So far so good, sounds interesting, right? Oh but you haven't run into the ITEMS yet.
That's right, items. Scattered around the map are items that could help you out in your quest to destroy Locusts and maximise your final score (because that's how wars a really measured!). Some are passive and always active, others need to be used to function and have limited charges. These items aren't indicated by any numbers or colours, so finding them is sheer luck, but it's the best kind of fortune when you do. Especially when you've just found Cole, whose jubilant whoops scare nearby Locust so much they actively become weaker. The wide range of items is what really makes the game: Everything from finding Colonel Hoffman and his awesome hax, to Betty's Locust crushing wheels, or even "finding" a torque bow bolt protruding from your armor... This is an amazingly well done evolution of Minesweeper's play mechanics with Gears of War's mythos and elements. It's synergistic, even. The "just one more go" feeling is strong with this one - This time you might even find Maria!
Jazz Jackrabbit the fighting game - Kolle Hond
Creating a 2D fighter presents a large array of problems: How do you define hit areas and calculate when someone has been damaged? How do you handle player input so that the game's movement feels natural and doesn't degenerate into pressing a "win" button fastest? How do you animate all of those attacks? The truth is, it's a tricky thing to get right, which is why there are certain game studios that specialise exclusively in fighting games.
I'm sure Kolle Hond will be one of the first to attest to the height of the hurdles surrounding fighting game nirvana... While turning Jazz Jackrabbit from a platformer into a fighter is an amiable goal, the truth is that the systems needed were just too complex for the month the competition ran over. While there's definitely something to the idea of seeing Jazz and co beating the snot out of each other, it's not going to be happening any time soon. Chalk this one up to experience, I think.
Left 4 Dead: The Card Game - Fengol
A card game? What? This is the first card game anyone's entered into these competitions in (counts fingers) 5 years! Awesome. Hang on, double-awesome - it's a re-imagining of Left 4 Dead, Valve's frantic zombie-destroying co-op "accidental" teamkill fest. I hope that made you curious, because now you get the game explained to you:
As a card game, Left 4 Dead has you all drawing cards face down from a central pile - each turn it's one player's lot to be "the difficulty" and draw anything from 1-3 cards extra, depending on if you want to play easy, normal or expert. (A card game with difficulty settings? Novel!) Once you've all drawn, the cards are flipped over at the same time and you find out if you've got zombies, special infected or - if you're really lucky - some kind of weapon or item in front of you. Some cards have on-flip actions: The Horde card makes you draw 2 cards face down when it's flipped, for instance (these 2 extra cards are only flipped next turn, another nice touch). Zombies deal damage at the end of a turn in which they haven't been killed (with the exception of Smokers, who damage on-flip)... The players kill zombies by matching a zombie's hit point total with their gun damage, which can be augmented by special cards like Molotovs or "There's Ammo Over Here" - which gives everyone +1 damage this round. Picking up different weapons is an important part of the game as each has its own strengths and weaknesses, similar to the way they work in the game itself. Players need to work together to take down the zombie hordes in their way, there's a great deal of strategising between flips - as well as conservation of med-kits and general panic should a Tank, Witch or (heaven forbid) both appear.
To top it all off, the card game echos the video game's Finales by having a finale mode that triggers once you've run out of cards to draw, turning an already tricky game into a tense final few rounds that either kills everyone or sees you all emerge as survivors, battle-scarred, weary and raring for another round.
Minesweeper Puzzle Platformer - Ramperkash
What a great question to ask a game designer: "What if, instead of being a disembodied mouse cursor, you put the person back into Minesweeper?" The idea of a puzzle platformer leaps into the conversation. Well, that and a top down "don't step on a mine" dexterity game with lots of explodey giblets. But still, how do you do a puzzle platformer with Minesweeper's rules?
First step, remove the auto clearing of areas with no mines in them. You don't want those precious blocks disappearing away from you when they could very well be the only way to get out of a hole. The platform mechanics dictate that you've got to be able to clear selectively, except that's a bit of a problem with a mouse... You can simply click anywhere to open a path for yourself, especially when there's no real penalty for hitting a mine other than more blocks being cleared. So nice start, but the game needs more of a puzzle angle - more to sink your teeth into and really take it away from Minesweeper Pathfinding and move it towards those evil little puzzles that are gloriously satisfying when you finally figure them out...
What if there was no mouse cursor, meaning your little man had to clear things himself? What if, instead of killing you, detonating mines flung said little man around, all ragdolled up? What if you took away the jump key and spent some time designing a few fiendish levels (or 20)? I, for one, would be keen to find out.
Starcraft as a brawler - DukeOfPrunes
This has to go down in history as one of the coolest ideas ever. People always want Starcraft as an FPS, or these days, as a new-fangled team-centric FPS/RTS-hybrid or some other related bullshit. DukeOfPrunes knows deep down in his heart what these fancy-pants sissies don't want to admit: Starcraft is about hitting things. Lots. Possibly also slobbering on them as well, but mainly about the hitting.
In the glorious tradition of games like Double Dragon, Golden Axe and the like, you basically spend your time pounding away at a button in lieu of actually being able to hit things in the face physically. Except this being, y'know, STARCRAFT, there's an amount of strategy to things as well: You build units and then make those units hit other units (I know, right?). Build order being all important and only being able to control the Protoss for the moment, you're pretty much told to build a probe immediately or else. Said probe goes off and does nasty things to minerals, the kind you require more of. Soon you'll be able to afford a combat unit (or three) which you can select with the spacebar and then you'll probably die as bastardly red Protoss zealots and dragoons destroy you. Yes, the game is hard, but it is possible (and actually rather rewarding) to win, provided you figure out how to knock enemies down (hit Z a lot) and control nearby friendly units (hit R a lot).
The game's not finished, but it damn well should be. Not only is the concept worthy of an ultralisk boner, it's fun too. There's enough unique cross-bleed across the genre gap to make it different and exciting, especially if you'd be able to spend resources (vespene, maybe?) to trigger special attacks like reaver drops or psi-storms. That would be badass! But the main reason this thing needs to be completed is that I want to see what DoP's Zerg units look like! His side-on zealots are kickass and he's drawn quite possibly the happiest dragoons in the history of ever. No pathing woes for them...
Super Gear of War XD Advance Alpha III - Gazza_N
Gears of War + JRPG. There you go, you've already imagined the game better than I could lay it out for you in an introductory paragraph, there's only one problem: You're not imagining it AWESOME enough.
If the name hasn't given it away, this is a rather humorous take on the game. You start out with some scene-setting random tongue in cheek dialogue, which works at least as well as those annoying parts where Marcus can't walk fast because there's a finger in his ear. Then all the members of Delta Squad - including the perpetually crying "Emodom" - inexplicably climb on top of Marcus and disappear... If that didn't make you immediately go "ZOMG JRPG-feel!" then you're really not doing this right. Marcus/Delta runs around, collecting COG tags and generally trying to grunt the Serran national anthem right up until you get too close to a locust, then you're trust into the combat screen. Yay, combat screen! (Again, if you're not gleeful at this, why do you even pretend to care about JRPGs?)
Combat proceeds in well-worn turn-taking fashion until either everyone in Delta or all the enemies are dead. Popping out from cover to fire at an enemy exposes you to damage and you only regen while in cover, making managing your squad quite simple, yet interesting. Especially when you pick up weapons: Equipping a sniper rifle or torque bow really does make a difference (and I personally love the way the torque bow works, taking a whole turn to crank up before it fires) and you can level up different stats to make you more accurate as a sniper, less prone to dying, do more damage, etc. Standard stuff so far. Standard until you get to active reloads.
Yes, Gears of War's seminal addition to the TPS milieu is represented wonderfully in Super Gear of War XDAA3: Every time a character has to reload their weapon, you're given the active reload minigame. A perfect reload gives you SP and a slight damage boost, a fluff costs you SP and probably makes Dom cry more. SP can be spent during combat for neat attacks, things like chainsawing one of the enemy, lobbing a grenade, calling down mortar fire or targeting the hammer of dawn. It's also a relatively long game, but please do note that as soon as you give it a try you'll finish wanting more of it. I'd kill to see the whole Gears saga redone this way. I really would.
TF2: Goldrush the puzzle game - Dammit
Team Fortress 2, you say. A hugely successful re-imagining of an ancient mod, itself initially an attempt to do the unthinkable to traditional FPS gameplay, you continue. Finally, what do you call a re-imagining of a re-imagining of a mod, you ask?
"Fun" springs to mind. "Strangely compelling", "A puzzle game?" and "Filled with TF2 in jokes" would also probably be on the tip of your tongue. You're tasked with guiding a lone Blu pyro around multiple levels (all themed after the TF2 "Meet the ..." videos, nice touch), each with a Payload-style bomb-on-a-track that you have to push toward the level exit. Death respawns you, but doesn't erase your progress so far, turning the game into a race against the ticking "level timer" and forcing you to take more risks, very clever. As you progress through the levels, the game introduces new characters, each of which kills you in a different way: Snipers jiggle left and right, firing arrows randomly; Scouts never bloody stop bleeding moving so they're hard to dodge; Heavies hog medics and spin around firing randomly, etc. They're all very true to the way the classes behave in TF2 itself, turning the game into an abstract take on the life of a pyro, on Goldrush - which is exactly what the game is called! OMW, utter hax!
I'd go further and imply that Dammit must be totally haxxoring due to this being her first foray into Game Maker and her first friggin game EVER, but that would be unkind. The long and the short of it is that guiding your little pyro around, trying to not get killed, pushing your cart feels absolutely great. All we need are more levels to play through (with some different characters working together, for example) and some liberally applied polish.
"Meet the Scout. He's a dick."
Wormies The Boardgame - Insomniac & DarthPenguin
Besides arriving via courier in an honest-to-goodness handmade box, the effort that's gone into Wormies The Boardgame is obvious from the word go. Slotting the enormous map together is done in a bemused haze as one of you reads the rules aloud in a silly voice (like you do). Setting up your wormy figures on the top-down map grid and handling all the other little doohickeys is rad. Or tubular. Or whatever the cool words were when Worms first came out. Once you're done setting up, the game pretty much plays like Worms. If you'd imagined Worms 3D, removed all the suck and as a 2D topdown game. If you know the franchise you'll be cackling as you murder worms (usually in brine, heh) and pick up crates around the map.
Eventually though, you realise that the game is a bit lacking in terms of that final punch. It's worms, but it's too close to worms and expects you to know the source game really well: What happens when a worm is poisoned? I have no idea, the boardgame's rules don't say. The slider-bar weapon counter card is neat, but it feels like a feature for feature's sake and not good game design: Weapons would be much better served as a hand of cards, each with their own rules on them, thus doing away with a whole extra printed page to constantly refer back to. It feels like the question of "What IF Worms was a boardgame?" has only been started to be explored, there's more to be asked and more gameplay to be found here, I really hope DarthPenguin and Insomniac find it. They certainly found a gem with the random placement card system - not to mention the sheer brilliant elegance of the random movement rules! If only the whole game felt as slick as that.
"WHERE'S MY WIFE?" - A Gears of War dating sim - Nandrew
Hot on the heels of his previous excursion into dating sim territory (and sporting a large collection of Hello Kitty merchandise), Nandrew steps up to the true blockbuster video game love story that shook the heavens: One man's quest to recover his love for his estranged wife in a ruined world; The true story of Dominic Santiago, a man on several missions.
Having found Maria (OMG SPOILERS), the love of your war torn life, you are now tasked with finding out if she truly can love again after what she's been through at the hands of her Locust spinster friends. As is now standard, you're given three choices of action to take per step along the way to Maria's heart, everything from impersonating Cole to juggling Locust heads (and other popular dating activities on Sera). The game is a heartfelt exploration of the human condition and an expose of the love that shook the gaming world, or maybe it's an ironic poke at overwrought story scenes and heavy-handed writing. You be the judge, you heartless bastard.
RESULTS:
This came down to a battle of completeness: All three top entries took turns being first in my mind, but in the end the games that felt the most like a complete experience won out.
First place: Left 4 Dead as a card game - Fengol
Print the cards out on heavy stock paper and start playing. That's all you need to do to have a great evening. Valve needs to know about this little gem
Second place: GearsSweeper - Nandrew
I've lost count of the amount of hours I've sunk into this game. STEP on mines, er, locust. Brilliant!
Third place: Super Gear of War XD Adventure Alpha III - Gazza_N
It looks like a JRPG. It plays like a JRPG. It feels like Gears. Gotta be a bloody winner. Played from start to finish in one sitting, didn't care what else happened. Serious about the full Gears saga like this, you'd win internets for sure.
Honorable mention:
TF2: Goldrush the puzzle game - Dammit
This is such a cool little action puzzler, lots of little TF2 nuances, great concept. Would have been top 3 in any other comp. If this is her first game ever, Dammit has serious Nandrew-esque potential!
Wormies The Boardgame - Insomniac & DarthPenguin
THEY MADE A COMPLETE PHYSICAL BOARDGAME! If that doesn't deserve honorable mention, I don't know what does. Come to rAge and play the game :)
...
These are the best competition entries that Game.Dev has produced so far, bar none. Seriously, I don't think I've ever enjoyed myself this much playing through everything before. I love this concept and it's pretty clear you all do to. We're going to do this again at some point, let's see what amazing stuff you all produce then!
The question of: "Do we need competitions here when there are so many international ones already?" is tricky.
I expect that long form (month long) competitions which encourage posting early are MUCH better at developing skills than weekend-and-forget competitions.
Wrapping longer form international competitions with local forum support might get some people making games and offers some extra feedback than just entering those competitions independently. But it sacrifices having instructive themes and tight constraints. And while lower expectations in entering local competitions (due to a smaller competing field) might be cool for getting participation from more starting-out developers, it comes at the cost of less opportunity for exposure.
(Although I'm not sure competitions themselves are that vital for getting good exposure. Games like Desktop Dungeons, Stasis and Viscera Cleanup got exposure just because they were good. And sometimes it is nice to be able to control when your game goes viral, rather than getting your audience's first introduction to your game be when your game might be a bit undercooked).
But getting people to participate in local competitions at all might be a problem...? (not sure) There's also no reason why some competitions can't be wrapped international ones, while other competitions have more instructional themes and be purely local.
Regarding organizing local competitions: How many reliable people would need to be involved to make this work? (assuming this is something we want to do).
Instead of having single members of the community judge the comps, maybe make a poll thread at the end of the comp that allows every member to rate each of the entries. Best entry after say 2 days of voting gets a wink and a respectful nod. (I don't know the intricacies of forum coding, so please slap me if I'm making to much work for someone.)
The main reason I would like to see them in these forums is that this is one of the friendliest communities on the internet, and I like having a safe space for feedback unlike some of the unjustified comments that one can get when posting on some of the international forums. And also get to discuss your ideas face to face with someone at the meet ups.
I would also like to offer up my time to help out with the organizing of these comps. I'm an artist with enough programming experience (Game Maker) to shove the things in my head onto a screen, so if you can use any of these skills to help out, please let me know, I'm there.
What I'd like to do if we have local comps again is reach out directly to schools and varsities like Learn3D and Wits to get their students involved. I realize this just adds to the amount of work for people giving feedback.
Feedback is built into the comps in multiple ways. Everyone can get feedback from forumites as they're building their games and updating their entry threads (this depends entirely on how often people update, but the trend was towards more updates as people got more comfortable entering competitions). At the end of the competition, everyone that entered something playable gets feedback from a judge. This is the carefully put together, constructive criticism in the form of a brief review that had such an impact on the culture of feedback on the forum as a whole. Rating the individual games against each other was always an afterthought and picking the top 3 (or 5, there were often ties) was so much easier than writing all those crit reviews - having people vote is solving a problem that doesn't exist.
As much as I'd LOVE compos to be a thing, I think we need to consider some kind of semi-mandatory incentivising of cross-playing-and-commenting system like LD to make them worthwhile. As great as @dislekcia's commentary are on the compos, it's really not productive/efficient/fair to lump the entire burden of operation on one person.
Also, I do see that there are quite a few prototypes that are just adrift with no little to commenting going on. We should look at whether that's because:
1) Noone has time, or
2) Not focussed (10 prototypes with the same theme is more likely to get cross-play/commentary than 10 prototypes with no common theme), or
3) Game posters are doing it wrong, or
4) Other? All of the above?
I agree that it'd be nice to incentivise feedback on each others' projects. I think that the Game.Dev competitions had a bit of social incentivisation (for example in the Game.Dev example @dislekcia states that games entered into these competitions will receive feedback, that's a social nudge towards making offering feedback normal).
Regarding your point 2 of "focus", I think just having multiple other people working on essentially the same brief lowers some barriers to offering feedback (when compared to offering feedback on a random project by a random person with random goals), as well as having the competition briefs be designed to allow for easier feedback (like @dislekcia was suggesting). I would agree that the focus of a competition allows better feedback.
I think that the competition environment also helps posters do it better (your point number 3). In reality, when posting a prototype on these forums you actually are competing for people's attention, but forum users often don't treat it as such because posting a prototype isn't framed that way. Doing it in a competitive environment might encourage some better habits (I think).
@Tuism Do you have any ideas for how additional incentivisation could work? (are you thinking callouts to the people offering the best feedback? or people who played the most of the entries?)
I think that the carefully thought out feedback is what really makes these competitions, and the guarantee of getting at least some quality feedback is a good incentive for taking part. Making the people behind entries do some of the judging is not a good alternative IMHO. Some of the less popular entries will get little feedback, and the general quality of the feedback cannot be relied upon.
In terms of the number of judges needed if we distribute the work, if we assume that:
- we get 30 entries,
- it takes one person 2 hours to properly play, judge and write feedback for an entry,
- we allocate two judges to each entry to increase the quality of feedback and deal with judges not having a chance, and
- it takes a half hour to edit two judge feedback pieces together,
it will take 135 man-hours to do the judging. So, if we limit the time per judge to 10 hours, we'll still need about 14 judges to help (damn!). Maybe having two judges per entry is unnecessary, but nonetheless, I suspect we'll need quite a few judges to help if we want to limit the time requirement. I suspect we'll need at least 10 judges to make things viable, with more being better.Having so many judges makes ranking the entries difficult, but perhaps each judge has the option to nominate up to two good entries and the nominated entries go into a rapid-fire voting thing to quickly find the top few. Then again, perhaps we should just throw out ranking completely?
The problem with a lot of judges is that it also dries up the pool of participants. @dislekcia couldn't ethically enter his own comps and he had some great idea. Also, people's whose feedback would really be worthwhile are too busy with paying game dev to help the comp.
@Tuism the problem with some of the "prototypes" posted on the forums, as @dislekcia has explained, is that they're already released on stores or considered "finished" games so feedback is too late to give and not asked for; they're posted as bragging rights.
Judging really isn't something to be taken lightly. It is a burden and a responsibility. Doing community focused work is often thankless, or at least proportionally so, and requires a lot more effort than you really ever think it is going to. Judging games is probably more so.
I don't really think that judges should be entering competitions. I believe that if you are stepping up to be a judge you are saying that for this competition you are putting the needs of the community's development above your own need for development, and not entering your own game is kinda a statement to that; beyond a basic ethical dilemma if there was ranking and such. I really want people to think about this when they say they want to judge. You really can't do it half-heartedly; you have to find some aspect of the game that you are judging and critique in a manner that understands the process of the developer, show them where they went wrong, and then where they can do better. It may be easy for someone who just made their first game, but it becomes more difficult the more experienced the developer. And when it comes to critique simply saying that a game is 'good' is one of the worst disservices that you can do the the developer who made the game.
Also if we run comps on a monthly basis then: You have to people making a game, judging the past month's games, and any other commitments to the community (like being on the council, or organizing things like Super Frienship Arcade) that is above the general fact of people being professional devs and putting what they have into making enough money to keep themselves housed and fed, or being a hobbyist where they have a job and those kind of commitments. There is no ideal scenario and in the end it requires those who are judging to make some kind of sacrifice in order to help the community. This isn't to say that once you are a judge that is all you can be, but while you are judging it is all you should be doing for that term.
And writing is not really something that is easy and you can just say that you can bang out a good piece in an hour. It requires writing, reading it, and rewriting and and leaving it so you can look at it with fresh eyes and understand how someone reading it for the first time will understand it. Thinking that you can have 5 people spend 2 hours writing, and bam there is good feedback. Especially when there is editing involve since there is quite a bit of back and forth between writer and editor. Also it’s quite possible that two different judges giving opposite opinions on a single point of the game, and I’ve seen that with IGF feedback.
I'd much rather we have fewer people who understand that this is a burden, but want to do it well, and want to provide the best feedback that they can in order to help others grow. Instead of having a many people just giving feedback in order to seem like they are participating. We want to set a standard of what it means to give insightful feedback so that people can grow and not just post things so that people can get props and status.
As a small side note: this post took me somewhere around 1.5-2 hours and I consider it rather poor.
The image I had in my head was that the competitions wouldn't necessarily be running back to back, but rather every second month or so. In this case I feel like it's reasonable for someone to enter something in one month, and then judge some other entries in the next month. Something to consider is that the judges may be influenced by their participation in the competition (not in terms of their entry vs the others, but in terms of how they judge games after exploring the theme somewhat themselves), but I'm not sure if that would be positive or negative.
So I guess what I'm saying is: I agree with you @Karuji, in terms of the seriousness of judging and the fact that it is a lot of work, but I don't see how that means a judge shouldn't participate if they have the time. However, having said all that, I would not have a big issue with a rule that judges can't participate, mostly because I know that I wouldn't be able to commit to both judging and taking part with my available time, but I don't really understand why the rule should be there.
A question that we need to address is: how frequently do we want to run these competitions? I think every second month is plenty, and perhaps every third month will be easier to get started.
Being "ranked" was actually incentive for me back in the day. The prospect of getting a "podium" position always motivated me to put in that extra effort, and it was a hell of a confidence boost to get one, even if we all knew that it didn't mean a whole lot in the grand scheme of things. Fortunately, the community was such that everyone took it in the spirit it was intended and you didn't get "winners" being doucheblossoms, so that helped loads.
(I never did beat my rival Nandrew in the compos though. He was too powerful for me. Blargh. :( )
I fully agree that distributing the judging seems like the best approach, especially since we have now have a good few old hands with commercially-released games under their belts, who can can be trusted to judge through experience. Assuming they want to, of course.
On another note, I have to agree with @Gazza_N - without any ranking, I think calling it a competition would be fairly pointless. And you probably would get less entries. A little competitiveness is a great motivator (especially when everyone still gets awesome amounts of feedback, so no one really loses, and the winner is merely given bragging rights). Bragging rights from the MGSA competitions may also help in terms of broader reach of the MSGA community. Consider how many proud prototypes might add a "Placed 2nd in MGSA Comp 22 in 2015" on their website or mention it to the press when their prototype becomes the next big thing on Steam. I know I would. It tells other people that other people thought your game was worth their time. Social proof in action.
For now the best example of feedback culture I've seen is the Ludum Dare system - comment & rate more, get more likely to get commentted and rated. So perhaps something to that effect, like we mandate it socially uncool if your entry was commented and rated by someone, you're a douche if you don't give back and go comment and rate theirs? Or some kind of balance (like the coolness score) that's basically ( [comment/rates you've given] - [comment/rates you've received] ). And people with minus karma are officially uncool. This gives all participants a soft yet clear message that we're here not just to receive, but to also give. Which I think is important.
I think that there's already an unspoken contract between us that it's cool to comment and feedback in general, but this system would frame it into one compo (so that participation is voluntary and not a general "because you're here you must" burden), and make it visible and thus front and center. Also, being event-specific, not delivering on on comp doesn't start you at minus values for the rest of eternity, you can have a better run in the next comp. Of course, constant non-giving will make other people less likely (justifiably so) to give to you too.
Of course, implementing such a system would probably be either entire manual (honor based) or take a while in the code backend (not ideal).
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On ranking, I personally don't find it so important to rank. Give me discussion over a high rank anyday. I would prefer if it weren't all about ranking. That said, Ludum Dare is able to have peer feedback AND comments AND rankings all work very well.
So I also do see why it would be good to be able to rank. If ranking and judging is to become a formal thing, then the peer-review system would probably not work, as the incentives aren't in the right place.
I agree with a rotating panel in that case. Better yet, a rotating panel of 2 or 3 - so instead of one person trying to cover everything ever, it's possible for 2 to 3 people to each give a much shorter comment, and still be pretty meaningful feedback in totality compared to the single one.
------------------------------------ I agree on those counts, but there really aren't that many of those, and I'd safely exclude those from the ones I was talking about - "prototypes seeking feedback".
IF we can do ranking AND feedback right, like LD does, that's first prize. If not, then I'd take a) removing the burden from a central judge b) getting more feedback from more people over the alternative.
I think we as a community did quite a bad job of fostering a culture and community of making lots of games in 2014. I think the competitions are a pivotal part of correcting that.
I think all these suggestions about how to run the competitions are great, but truthfully I think those are all ideal goals for an ideal situation. Considering we haven't had a competition in over a year (abouts), I think we're waayyyyyy past ideal territory. We kind of need to just get a competition running again and figure out the rest from there. Lest this discussion once again result in little action.
Why I think the competitions are so important:
Their month long format is a lot friendlier to part-time individuals than game jams (I jam as much as possible, and I still miss a lot of the major jams)
You get feedback from people who have knowledge of your game making history and give you feedback that is contextualised and can comment on how you're improving (this is highly valuable to me because I feel like I'm spinning my wheels as a creator, but can only happen if we're having regular jams).
They act as a motivating framework for making more games
To me, what seems like is holding the competitions back from happening is convincing someone to judge, and consequently prevent them from participating in addition to giving up a large portion of hours. Frankly, I think it's unfair to ask someone to do that and is also unlikely to happen. Additionally, I'm not sure detailed and delicious feedback is a must have, it's just a nice-to-have. Ludum Dare, Global Game Jam and even the Poppenkast didn't have expert/judged feedback and they continually produced both games and game makers that are quite impressive.
The reason I would want to do these competitions is to be in a framework where I'm making more games in a semi competitive environment with a group of people who know my body of work giving me contextualised feedback.
So, what I'd suggest:
@dislekcia Picks a theme (nothing that perfectly fits the entire community as that's too hard without more competitions happening)
We host it on itch.io (Just for the rating and submissions, development threads should still take place on MGSA).
We figure out expert judging and the rest later.
I think to run these competitions as best as possible, we really need to unpack who we're running these competitions for. Part of the dilemma both the judging and the general overwhelming stress of organising the competitions is that I think we're trying to organise for every possible entrant. We're trying to run competitions (or so it seems) for both newcomers and veterans. Which is a terribly hard thing to do.
Newcomers simply value making a game for the process itself, and some surface level, positive, pat-on-the-back feedback (I could still do with some of this: send compliments to @Ben_Myres on Twitter - thanks). In contrast, veterans crave feedback, but also simply value the creation of a prototype.
I think expert judging really is something to be valued, and because we value it so highly perhaps we should be treating it like a reward? From the ratings that happen on itch.io, the top 6 rated games get expert judging (by perhaps more than 1 judge to make it particularly enticing). A format like this is really geared towards improving the top tier of entrants, which isn't friendly, no, but it really helps create a community striving for excellence, which is something I'd like to see encouraged.
We can explore the judging as reward format even more: top 3 and bottom 3 rated entries get feedback and perhaps a 3 randomly selected games between these 6 games get judged too. I would really love to see this happen as it would allow judges to participate and ease their time commitment, making it more likely for competitions to happen.
At a meta level, we can also be running different types of competitions (at an ideal level here again), so 5 "community competitions" a year where judging is the reward and 1 "Newcomer" competition where it's specifically geared to newcomers and we get every game judged by at least one 'expert'. We could run a parallel competitions to the newcomer competition which is about giving feedback. So we have all these silly awards that we give out to encourage the community to give the games a lot of feedback. We could even do judging/feedback rating so that you get feedback on the judging/feedback you give.
As @Bensonance says, it comes down to what people want from the exercise. It also comes down to whether anyone is willing, able and trusted enough by the community to wear the Mantle of Judgement.
I don't think it's ideal (I'd ideally like everyone to get length feedback), but I think it's a pragmatic compromise and might be the difference between holding one really great competition and then burning out, and, holding a regular competition (and a competition every two months is far better that a great competition once or twice).
Do people want?
May I ask why its so important to have a dedicated judge? I think if we have an experienced judge that's willing to give feedback to everyone every few jams thats rad. However, I feel like waiting to find someone/some people to act as judge does more harm than good. Why not go with the entrants judge/give feedback to themselves (with the usual post mortem threads in the forums) and when someone is willing to give in-depth/experienced feedback that's also great.
Personally I think getting people to make more games more often is better than trying to force out feedback to everyone... At least that has seemed to work out well for the sound jams (and yes I know that we are sorely due for another sound jam).
The whole notion of why we are debating the judging and such is to determine a method that best advances the community from participating in these competitions and saying that by some arbitrary decision you don't get feedback is really fucking disheartening. Like even the thought of that makes me not want to be involved in such an action on any level.
I remember the first competition we did (making a pixel art sprite) where I didn't really get any feedback in the end of the comp because I just kept of posting stuff all the time. And yeah a part of that motivation was that it was a competition, it was friendly competition, but I really wanted to make some progress.
I think people need to realize that there is a difference between a jam and a competition. Jams are more laid back and just making stuff for the fun of it. Completions have an extra sense of drive, even if it completely arbitrary, but it creates an environment where you want to push yourself to do better, to be better.
Competition has more enforcement in the constraint. And constraints force you to think and design. Like really who give a fuck if you don't stick to a LD theme? But with the old Game.Dev themes you stuck to them, you would push it to the edge of what it could possibly mean to be in the theme, but that's what forced creativity.
I can start a Jam right now, but it wouldn't have the same results in driving the member here to be more creative and try new things as a thoughtful competition would.
I still kinda don't really see why you make a strict difference between a jam and a comp. If you don't follow the rules in a comp are you really going to get penalised? Isn't LD a comp and a jam?
On a side note, I would like to downvote the idea of having any system which forces people to feedback on other entrants. On one hand, you'll get a whole bunch of nothing feedback ("get game. GG. Controls didn't work." etc) which isn't in depth because the person didn't feel personally motivated to actually say anything about the game (or perhaps play it - which, is a learning curve actually, even for newbies. Even if you make a great game, it's still up to you to promote it. It's not the community's job...but I digress). On the other hand, it's unfair to also suggest that every game would be accessible to every other entrant. That means linux, mac and pc builds need to be created. That also means if someone posts a card game/board game/physical game involving multiple players or unusual objects that all other entrants are now expected to go the extra mile to give it a shot. I mean, it's cool if they want to, but I don't expect many people have the time to devote to others' games for this and I think it's unfair to force it. And, this is why we need a judge...someone who has opted to dedicate the time to try all the games and give feedback (to at least some).
A quick thought here too - feedback is a vital part of the competition. Leaving it only for the top and bottom entries means that the middle entries might never properly learn or make improvements at the same pace as they could have with better feedback. That feels mightily unfair.
* @Karuji seems to have posted some of my thinking while I was typing :P
Also, while itch.io might well be awesome, we did try hosting stuff on external sites in the Game.Dev days. I have no idea how many of you still remember the Great Games Experiment, but yeah, the final verdict was "doesn't really work". Biggest problem: People having to maintain two places at the same time.
I think the next step is the pragmatic one of starting a competition and seeing where it goes. The trick is that it's not the first comp that should be evaluated, it's the community's behavior and culture during SECOND one. As such, considered judge feedback is pretty important... In fact, I find it quite interesting how difficult it is to convince people that the universal, encouraging, constructive crit is key. That's the part that is the hardest to actually do, as everyone has pointed out. It's also the part that's missing in every other competition format.
@Tuism: We already have Ludum Dare. People like @BlackShipsFilltheSky and @Bensonance are pointing out problems with LD in terms of impact on the local community. If LD worked, we wouldn't be talking about hosting our own comps.
@Fengol: I can set up themes and things, that's not the part of doing the competitions that I needed help with.
I believe itch.io can support a peer rating system, we just need to choose the criteria. I'm not sure that ratings are necessary, but I think it's not very detrimental so I'm ok with having them.
I'd also like to note that in terms of feedback, I don't think LD-style competitions really work. The level of feedback you get at such a competition is not really of that high quality IMHO. I think the area LD really excels in is exposure, and that's not really our objective, so trying to emulate LD is not necessarily a good idea.
EDIT: damn, this thread is busy. I think there was more than 5 replies in the time I wrote my response. Sorry if I repeated things.
I just didn't see why the comps had to be so formal and structurally similar to each other. I guess I like the spontinuity of jams :/ (and I mean spontinuity like the local jams not regular LD style jams)
Apologies, I wasn't trying to cause anyone to get flustered or explain things for the 1000'th time.
If people are going to say stuff like "get game. GG. Controls didn't work.", then they're demonstrating that's the level of care that they're putting into the community. They are building their own reputation. It's not even something we need to bother policing. I agree with not forcing people to give feedback - or rather - not giving feedback on everything. That's why I thought we could go with LD-like Coolness system where you're shown karma (placeholder name for whatever the variable is) = [feedback given] - [feedback gotten]. It shows how much you give, without FORCING you to give. You don't even have to give to those who gave to you - maybe you genuinely can't find anything to feedback to the person who gave to you, which is fine, you can give back - to the community - in another thread. Another prototype. Agreed. I did LD with a strict compliance to the theme. Others didn't. It's all up to the individual, really. The only real difference is that in this smaller community, non-compliance is bound to stick out like a sore thumb and beaten down socially anyway. Who cares if you call it a jam or a comp?
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If we decide here that judging is the best way forward, because it "guarantees good feedback and results", than more than anything, we need to talk about how to keep it sustainable. That's the key really, there's been many, many compo reboot threads, as @Bensonance pointed out. That's because leaving all the burdens on one set of shoulders, no matter how awesome that person is, is both unfair and unrealistic. @dislekcia has done a great job so far, kudos to him, but if we keep doing the same thing we'll just be faced with another comp reboot thread a few months down the line.
And that's why I think peer-commentary is a good system to go with - if everyone is well aware of what's expected of them going into the comp, I think it's more than fair for everyone to contribute towards meaningful engagement. Give and take.
I also don't particularly think forcing feedback is a good idea. I think having a group of people making a game around a similar theme to you is a pretty good encouragement for giving feedback to them anyway :).
@dislekcia
I do agree that expert feedback is important for the competitions, but I disagree with some of your assumptions -or perhaps posit that the lessons you learnt might not be applicable here? I dunno: but here my thoughts: :) So I have to be frank and ask: as opposed to what? I think it's completely reasonable to be expecting people to be improving on their own? These competitions just need to be a kickstart to get them working. Outside of the competitions, as @BlackShipsFilltheSky often mentions, you're competing for attention and feedback on a forum like this. Realistically you do have to earn criticism by framing your game correctly. And yeah, Ideally the competitions would be able to avoid a situation like this, but we don't have the people power to do that anymore - it's painful, but it's a reality, I think.
However,I'm not sure "everyone can improve together". Isn't the skill range of the community just too broad to be doing that anyway? Additionally, I think we're all underestimating the amount you learn simply from creating a game - that's improvement too. Feedback on a game you create is merely emphasising/magnifying/shifting what you learnt.
Finally, I see your point about the double maintainence of threads if something like itch.io was used. But I would hope that MGSA threads would be used for the entire month, and itch.io would only be used for something like the last day. That way all your development is on MGSA and we get to benefit from the Itch.io structure. Additionally, we can include categories on the rating system that encourage people to do certain things : "Iterations Posted : 0/5" for a crass example.
Anyho, I think as long as we've decided a competition date by something like the end of the week, I think we're heading in a good direction :).
Or are the compromises we're talking about so great as to render the exercise worth less than the effort?
And if this can be done, then when would be a good time to do this?
Start in Feb, carry on a little longer because it's a short month and we'll need time to argue about who does the judging anyway?