Competition A Meta-thread
The point of this thread is to provide reasoning for how Competition A was set up and the thinking that went into it. The idea being that not only do we have a place to discuss the competition itself to make it better for the future, but also to allow other people to take over and run their own competitions as the site grows.
This is something that wasn't always apparent when I was running Game.Dev competitions, but there's a lot of design-based thinking that goes into a competition like this. I'll start with the goals of the competition itself, then how I approached those and finally, areas that could improve next time and possible continuations of the competition. Feel free to crit my logic as much as is needed, that's how we'll grow awesome competitions in the future.
Goals:
In no particular order:
Drive artist participation
MGSA seems pretty good at getting people who are into programming to do things, that's awesome. But that's not the only skill that goes into making games. Not by a long shot... So, one of the skillsets that we need is game art. Game art is different to most regular art, or at least, it's a specialisation with it's own unique issues, as @Elyaradine has so eloquently discussed in the past. Bottom line: Moar game art please!
Common ground
Except game art on its own isn't really useful. We need people to be able to TALK about game art, everyone should be able to communicate visually, be they a programmer, design hobo, audio maven or pixel junkie. To do that, we need to have examples of communication around art that don't chase people away. Showcases of constructive criticism that people can learn from (not just artistically, conversationally too). After all, what good is having the best artist in the world on a project if that artist and the best programmer in the world (hey, reach for the stars) can't find common ground to begin hashing out what their game needs to do?
The Game.Dev comp structure seems perfectly evolved to drive this type of communication, even though it was only previously used to talk about game design. The basics of that structure are the following:
1. Focus on constraints so that people are trying to solve the same set of problems, this creates common ground for communication.
2. Force entrants to start new threads for each entry, this gives people a place to talk to each other in. Plus it also acts as a record of progress as people add to their work (the easy image uploading really helped with this).
3. Provide feedback at the end of the competition for each entry... This still needs to happen (frankly, I'm terrified of that, any help would be appreciated).
4. Usually I'd require people to have a readme.txt file with their game entry, but this time I figured that wouldn't make much sense - The only real info people needed the character name and some existing art of that character. Future art comps might require more stringent guidelines if they involve animation or other file-formats, for instance.
5. The Game.Dev comps all had numbers, which was literally an accident of sequelitis. I chose letters to differentiate from those, seeing as I still talk about "Comp 16" from those days, ideally every odd letter would be an art comp and every even letter would be a dev comp.
Short timescale and output
I spend a lot of time thinking about good constraints for an art-based competition. While randomly browsing the net, I came across these two pieces by Feng: http://fengzhudesign.blogspot.com/2012/10/dott-remake.html and http://fengzhudesign.blogspot.com/2012/10/monkey-island.html in which he re-rendered iconic scenes from old-school games in his more modern style. This seemed like a rad idea: Challenge artists to pick a favorite scene in an old game and then re-render that as though it were in a new game coming out now. That would allow all sorts of discussions about style and presentation, but it felt like that would fail the constraint element of the competition: I would be challenging people to go from a highly constrained environment (pixel art and limited colours) to a much less constrained modern canvas. That's the opposite of what I was planning to do with the comp, plus it would alienate a lot of the non-classically-trained art dabblers and all-out hopeless tools like me.
So, what if I went the other direction? Asked people to take a character they liked from a more modern game and render that in the style of older games? Suddenly we have a clean set of constraints (some of the size restrictions were actually examples of "fake" constraints, nobody is going to try to draw something in 4x4 pixels if I don't highlight that as a constraint up front, for instance) and the less artistically inclined can get involved with little to no ego danger - it's "just pixel art" after all. Except everyone's now talking about pixel techniques and pushing each other to draw more.
Instroducing structured competitions
I noticed that there was a large difference in expectation between the old Game.Dev regulars and recent MGSA members in terms of competitions. I had initially thought that the old Game.Dev comps would be the de-facto model for competitions and community involvement here, seeing as so much was learned there over the years. As such, I didn't really talk about the Game.Dev stuff too much, until I suddenly noticed the difference and proceeded to textwall all over the place. Sorry about that.
This thread is an attempt to both introduce structured competitions (meaning it couldn't be complex or exclusionary, as discussed above) and to get people into the idea of running their own competitions along similar grounds. In discussions with friends I noticed that the type of thinking that went into Game.Dev behind the scenes wasn't obvious in the slightest, hopefully this thread is a step in the right direction.
Feedback and improvement:
The competition seems to have produced a reasonable spike in activity. The final test will be in how much more artists stay active on the forum though, I already worry that we haven't really attracted too many new artists - that seems to be a function of visibility, something we'll have to work on for future competitions in this vein. I do plan to keep alternating between art and dev competitions each month, hopefully that won't lead to too much fatigue in the long term, plus the thing we need most is sustained activity: People join in when they see others doing cool stuff.
I worry that not many tutorials were shared. Feel free to provide links to any you've discovered below. I also worry about the judging... Right now I'm thinking about the following categories:
1. Top 3 (as art that faithfully represents a modern character as pixel art)
2. Most improved (the artist that learned the most through the competition)
3. Coolest concept (the raddest damn idea to come out of the competition)
The problem is that I have no idea how to judge these things, it would be extremely subjective of me to simply choose things on my own, but that's what I might have to end up doing. I also have currently have no scope to judge style, nor is it really embodied by any category above. The real issue comes in when I start talking about feedback - Game.Dev comps would always end with each entry getting a little mini-review and at least 1 good thing to highlight and 1 thing to work on in future. Who am I to be giving feedback on art? I'm always just going to come across as a designer talking about art from the prespective of using it, I'm not sure that's going to gel with serious artists, although it is kinda what MGSA is all about.
So, comments, feedback on the competition as a whole and ideas on the things I've raised (and the things I haven't raised) are more than welcome! Hopefully we can nominate others to run these competitions over the course of the next year, I'd love each one to be done by a new person :) - To that end, please tell me what you'd need to know in order to run a comp that I might have left off here. That's super-important.
P.S. On the Feng stuff and redrawing as a competition: It could work in future, but would need to introduce constraints in interesting ways. Possibly restricting the redrawing to existing games from this forum (or from a previous competition, for instance) - the goal there being to get artists and developers working together more closely in the future. We're unfortunately not ready for that goal just yet though...
This is something that wasn't always apparent when I was running Game.Dev competitions, but there's a lot of design-based thinking that goes into a competition like this. I'll start with the goals of the competition itself, then how I approached those and finally, areas that could improve next time and possible continuations of the competition. Feel free to crit my logic as much as is needed, that's how we'll grow awesome competitions in the future.
Goals:
In no particular order:
- Drive artist participation in the community.
- Give artists and non-artists common ground for discussion and skill-sharing.
- Short timescale means that the competition needs to be easy to start and engaging afterward.
- Output is paramount, everyone that entered needs stuff to show.
- Introduce structured competitions at MGSA.
Drive artist participation
MGSA seems pretty good at getting people who are into programming to do things, that's awesome. But that's not the only skill that goes into making games. Not by a long shot... So, one of the skillsets that we need is game art. Game art is different to most regular art, or at least, it's a specialisation with it's own unique issues, as @Elyaradine has so eloquently discussed in the past. Bottom line: Moar game art please!
Common ground
Except game art on its own isn't really useful. We need people to be able to TALK about game art, everyone should be able to communicate visually, be they a programmer, design hobo, audio maven or pixel junkie. To do that, we need to have examples of communication around art that don't chase people away. Showcases of constructive criticism that people can learn from (not just artistically, conversationally too). After all, what good is having the best artist in the world on a project if that artist and the best programmer in the world (hey, reach for the stars) can't find common ground to begin hashing out what their game needs to do?
The Game.Dev comp structure seems perfectly evolved to drive this type of communication, even though it was only previously used to talk about game design. The basics of that structure are the following:
1. Focus on constraints so that people are trying to solve the same set of problems, this creates common ground for communication.
2. Force entrants to start new threads for each entry, this gives people a place to talk to each other in. Plus it also acts as a record of progress as people add to their work (the easy image uploading really helped with this).
3. Provide feedback at the end of the competition for each entry... This still needs to happen (frankly, I'm terrified of that, any help would be appreciated).
4. Usually I'd require people to have a readme.txt file with their game entry, but this time I figured that wouldn't make much sense - The only real info people needed the character name and some existing art of that character. Future art comps might require more stringent guidelines if they involve animation or other file-formats, for instance.
5. The Game.Dev comps all had numbers, which was literally an accident of sequelitis. I chose letters to differentiate from those, seeing as I still talk about "Comp 16" from those days, ideally every odd letter would be an art comp and every even letter would be a dev comp.
Short timescale and output
I spend a lot of time thinking about good constraints for an art-based competition. While randomly browsing the net, I came across these two pieces by Feng: http://fengzhudesign.blogspot.com/2012/10/dott-remake.html and http://fengzhudesign.blogspot.com/2012/10/monkey-island.html in which he re-rendered iconic scenes from old-school games in his more modern style. This seemed like a rad idea: Challenge artists to pick a favorite scene in an old game and then re-render that as though it were in a new game coming out now. That would allow all sorts of discussions about style and presentation, but it felt like that would fail the constraint element of the competition: I would be challenging people to go from a highly constrained environment (pixel art and limited colours) to a much less constrained modern canvas. That's the opposite of what I was planning to do with the comp, plus it would alienate a lot of the non-classically-trained art dabblers and all-out hopeless tools like me.
So, what if I went the other direction? Asked people to take a character they liked from a more modern game and render that in the style of older games? Suddenly we have a clean set of constraints (some of the size restrictions were actually examples of "fake" constraints, nobody is going to try to draw something in 4x4 pixels if I don't highlight that as a constraint up front, for instance) and the less artistically inclined can get involved with little to no ego danger - it's "just pixel art" after all. Except everyone's now talking about pixel techniques and pushing each other to draw more.
Instroducing structured competitions
I noticed that there was a large difference in expectation between the old Game.Dev regulars and recent MGSA members in terms of competitions. I had initially thought that the old Game.Dev comps would be the de-facto model for competitions and community involvement here, seeing as so much was learned there over the years. As such, I didn't really talk about the Game.Dev stuff too much, until I suddenly noticed the difference and proceeded to textwall all over the place. Sorry about that.
This thread is an attempt to both introduce structured competitions (meaning it couldn't be complex or exclusionary, as discussed above) and to get people into the idea of running their own competitions along similar grounds. In discussions with friends I noticed that the type of thinking that went into Game.Dev behind the scenes wasn't obvious in the slightest, hopefully this thread is a step in the right direction.
Feedback and improvement:
The competition seems to have produced a reasonable spike in activity. The final test will be in how much more artists stay active on the forum though, I already worry that we haven't really attracted too many new artists - that seems to be a function of visibility, something we'll have to work on for future competitions in this vein. I do plan to keep alternating between art and dev competitions each month, hopefully that won't lead to too much fatigue in the long term, plus the thing we need most is sustained activity: People join in when they see others doing cool stuff.
I worry that not many tutorials were shared. Feel free to provide links to any you've discovered below. I also worry about the judging... Right now I'm thinking about the following categories:
1. Top 3 (as art that faithfully represents a modern character as pixel art)
2. Most improved (the artist that learned the most through the competition)
3. Coolest concept (the raddest damn idea to come out of the competition)
The problem is that I have no idea how to judge these things, it would be extremely subjective of me to simply choose things on my own, but that's what I might have to end up doing. I also have currently have no scope to judge style, nor is it really embodied by any category above. The real issue comes in when I start talking about feedback - Game.Dev comps would always end with each entry getting a little mini-review and at least 1 good thing to highlight and 1 thing to work on in future. Who am I to be giving feedback on art? I'm always just going to come across as a designer talking about art from the prespective of using it, I'm not sure that's going to gel with serious artists, although it is kinda what MGSA is all about.
So, comments, feedback on the competition as a whole and ideas on the things I've raised (and the things I haven't raised) are more than welcome! Hopefully we can nominate others to run these competitions over the course of the next year, I'd love each one to be done by a new person :) - To that end, please tell me what you'd need to know in order to run a comp that I might have left off here. That's super-important.
P.S. On the Feng stuff and redrawing as a competition: It could work in future, but would need to introduce constraints in interesting ways. Possibly restricting the redrawing to existing games from this forum (or from a previous competition, for instance) - the goal there being to get artists and developers working together more closely in the future. We're unfortunately not ready for that goal just yet though...
Thanked by 1hanli
Comments
First comment would be - more bolding :P It's still quite walloftexty :P
The constraints-approach of bot pixel art AND the subject matter provided both a focus and a lower barrier to entry, which are both, as we discovered, better than the lack of either (focus and low barrier to entry). This encouraged lots of participation, which is great.
A challenge for the future is finding more appropriate constraints that would allow people outside of the core (in this case non-artists) to be able to comfortably come in and not feel like "meh I can't do that". Pixels were a great way of bridging the non-artist and the artist. Sketching? The pencil equivalent of pixels suddenly scares the crap out of everyone. I guess we'll brainstorm on it a lot more later. Like... Animating a pixel to feel heavy, bouncy, whatever? (I'm sure academically trained artists have done that in class before :P) Meh.
The resultant exchange of info, opinions and assistance was very cool, too. The lack of tutorials, well, there were a few, but I'm not even sure if those few were read. I guess if more were spammed more would have been consumed. There were some very good articles shared though, like the one about banding. I guess they weren't in an obvious place, and we could compile those we do have and present them as good reads coming out of the comp, either as part of the results or wherever.
As for the judging... I think that every entrant has gotten really valuable feedback through their posting their work, people were more than happy to engage, so half of that is done... I guess. But to have a proper sign-off is understandably desired. I think there's definitely something valuable for someone's "art" to be critiqued from a practical point of view. Criteria-wise, there's no need to limit the comp to 3 "winrars". My suggested categories would be:
1. Most faithful reproduction/s of modern characters in pixel art (in each major resolutions - 4x4, 16x16, 32x32, 64x64)
2. Most improvement
3. Damn prettiest
4. Coolest concept
5. Most practical (will be animatable/usable and good)
6. Most impractical (will never ever be effectively animated but is pretty)
7. Best use of colours/contrast
8. Least banding (lol)
We can explore the heck out of the theme, it's not like we're gonna run out of prizes :P
If the other guys are up for it too, the resident artist (myself, @elyaradine, @bevis, @damousey?) (time willing) can maybe jump in and comment on some of the judging - it's not like we haven't already been doing during the comp :) But it is your comp, I guess... I also don't want it to become a big ball of stickiness with a million opinions. I think at the end of the day so-called judging can benefit from a singular point of view.
I mean, it'd obviously take a little longer as things evolve with iteration and feedback, but it didn't feel like this bottomless pit. What often puts me off making games (or anything really) for a comp is that I often have no idea how long something will take, and I think I'm pretty terrible at scaling things down to fit how much time I can afford, especially when it comes to non-art fields. I find that especially with programming, where it actually seems to take me quite a long time to make something pretty basic, so it takes a lot of initial investment to test whether something is fun or not. Maybe that's just experience; I'm not sure.
As for future art competitions, like @Tuism I was also wondering about where one could go from here. :P Animating pixel art sounds like a good one. Or doing pixel art but only having 2 or 3 colours (which could help in some of the cases where I think having lots and lots of choices of colours was overwhelming). Drawing things using only basic shapes (cylinders, cubes, spheres).
OOOH JUST HAD AN IDEA
Someone must have a half-decent prototype. Challenge - everyone make sound effects for the game! Along with a couple of tutorials on how to make sound effects homebrewed, and some tips on how to easily edit the things. Then submit, and hopefully someone can easily insert the sounds into their prototype (or build something that even lets people easily insert their own sounds into manually? Like set up a game that loads from external, and participants save sound files as certain names, stick them into the right directory... That sounds like fun. Of sorts. I would really like to learn about sound and music, the easy way.)
If you're keen to take the reins with this structure shout here so we can have a coordinated effort.
As for this art comp. It would be awesome to have someone outside the community give an unbiased opinion. Maybe @Hanli can call on some other art lecturers or an indie artist someone knows from GDC or the like.
Something I'd like to see in an art comp is 3D level design. Building levels for Bladeslinger showed you have to think carefully about draw distance because stuff gets clipped and you can have too many polygons on the screen. This conflicts with wanting to create impressive vistas for players to enjoy. The comp would be to build a scene in Unity3D or Unreal and have it meet framerate and polygon requirements.
I don't mind judging if u need me.
question, you cant enter if you are judging? I think that's standard practise.
We got some cool ideas! but the most important thing I think is to make it as easy for people to participate as possible, eliminating as many technical gaps as we can possibly, in whatever context. If someone can show me how to "easily" design 3D levels that also conform to poly counts I'm all for it :p if someone tells me "first of all, get maya", then I believe I'll sooner do anything else :p
So making it as concise and duh as possible but giving enough room to have fun, tough but that will be what makes it meaningful :)
Right now I'm leaning towards a minimalist animation idea for the next comp, you can do the animation in anything, but it would obviously be better in a system that has playability. Bottom line: Inject as much character as possible into a pretty basic set of squares and triangles... I have this pigeon-based prototype see ;)
And I see that might be what will happen with a lot of the technically-oriented stuff - requiring code. Only the coders will be able to even relate to it, and even then it'll require a lot of learning time. Which I'm all for, if it's done to my level of understanding. But you then might lose the interest of the more advanced guys... Anyhoo, it's difficult to balance the opposing diametric.
I look forward to how we can solve general issues of that nature - that people can make things, and someone would take those things and very easily (or someone makes something that very easily) combines entry assets and destination into a prototype that shows the influence of the entry in a good context. That requires REALY coding know-how (I can dream up the hows but I can't code it :P)
But yeah, that's much more technical art than straight up asset creation. Which to me is one of the big differentiators in terms of producing art for games: this art has to breathe.
Tough cookie, that.
Size limits, palette limits and theme limits were all valuable ways for me to look at a very small part of a very broad canvas and feel like I could do something really simple and do it at least half-well. Learn just a smattering of rules at a time and work with them in a simple environment instead of being asked to build the art version of an MMO :P
Makes me feel that it pretty much nails the "common ground" idea. I was doing the same stuff as a lot of people and *actively learned* some things in the process, often from other people's threads because their work and problems were relatable.
If I had to compare this to the idea of a "freestyle" art competition where anybody could do anything in anyway ... would not have touched that with a 10ft barge pole, as they say. And I would have remained blissfully unaware of the new tricks and helpful ways of thinking that are now on my imaginary art CV.
Funnily enough, I'm going to suggest that we add constraints to the competitions themselves:
1. Competitions must respond to a need in the community.
2. Competitions must allow for easy communication of ideas.
3. Competitions must do everything possible to lower barriers of entry.
We already know that constraints work better to lower the cognitive idea explosion barriers to entry, but I'm a strong proponent of working backwards from existing problems, so here's each point in more detail:
1. If we focus on responding to needs, then competitions often propose themselves. People aren't posting enough videos of their games, for instance. So that suggests a competition around making/editing and uploading videos to youtube. Maybe we have some sort of trailer-editing competition where build trailers, ok that's a cool idea, but how do we deal with the communication of ideas issue? What if everyone is talking about the same game, or restricted to games everyone can download and play easily (from this very forum, for instance)? Surely we'd need a pretty good thread about video editing tools and methods FIRST on the forum before this competition would fly. How would we lower barriers to entry? Well, the best way to deal with the barriers to both starting out AND feedback would be to pick some uncomfortable time constraint that everyone hated at first, but meant that you'd HAVE to pick the best footage and convey at most 2 ideas in your trailer, so like 30 seconds is all you get. That way other people will be able to easily watch the videos too, so that facilitates communication and feedback again.
2. Communication of ideas is a tricky one. I think that often the goal here is to allow people to comment and provide meaningful feedback with as little effort as possible... I expressly picked pixel art at the first set of constraints for the Comp A because everyone can easily say "Hey, that needs to be 1 pixel to the left there" or "What's with that rogue dark pixel near the right eye?". Imagine what it would be like for people to comment on a sketch-based set of artwork for comparison: Suddenly you have no inherent size reference, to offer practical information you practically have to redraw the thing you're talking about! That's not easy communication. (Yes it's valid communication and yes it's important that we get to that sort of competition in the future, but ONLY WHEN IT'S AN OBVIOUS NEED THAT THE COMMUNITY HAS! - And yes, I expect people to disagree over the relative severity of specific needs, that's why we have the other criteria to help us pick the competition that is best ABLE to address all three, not just the needs on their own)
3. Barriers to entry are our biggest enemies. There's a natural progression to competitions like this, because we WANT to do cooler things as we all learn and grow. Right now, we don't have that many game prototypes that people could take screenshots of and redraw in new art styles for art competitions. That's a barrier that we'll take down over time. People have suggested ways to remove barriers around making game sound competitions, but some of those put up barriers for the people who should be editing their games to load external sound files. We also can't do a "record footage of a game and make your own sounds to totally change the feeling of what's going on" competition until people are up to speed with youtube and we've got that video editing thread, for instance. So barriers are something that we'll tackle progressively. That progress is actually the largest element of competition evolution, as far as I'm concerned - because you want to have a community that's so good at circumventing barriers that new people can join up for a specific competition and not even notice the barriers they're hurdling with the community's support. That's the mark of success for me.
Between Linkin Park tonight, multiple airport trips earlier this week and IGF judging, my discriminatory time is a bit limited at the moment. Will get on it.
I personally really struggle with the "make a prototype" thing myself. Feels like there's a huge fence between me and where all the cool kids are playing. The idea of entering Comp B was HUGE, it would have been like taking on NaNoWriMo.
Paradoxically, if we were to focus on a component like sound editing, video trailering, change the feeling entirely while making the smallest possible actual changes etc, I would jump in with both feet.Those fringe skillsets don't read as barriers of entry for me, finding those solutions around the core gamemaking is a field I'm much more comfortable in.
I might just be weird and alone in my own playground, where a competition all about easing animation sounds like a fun weekend, but perhaps we could attract more of these support types to the community by piqueing those interests. I'm just saying don't dismiss a skill requirement as a barrier, it just might be the sort of inlet we may want.
To that end, I'll encourage people to jump in with the easier engines, and do tutorials - I think it helps a lot.
But at the same time I think the best way for people who aren't dev/code-inclined to get into it is maybe at a jam where there are people on hand to show you how things work in the world of code.
I think it's especially pertinent to the creative field, where people are conditioned already towards multimedia, but not code and instructions and maths. Creative field people understand music, art, animation and other assets to a much larger degree than CODE. It's both a perception and a practical issue.
So in a way, I think it's alright that we have both comps that cater to the code and dev side and comps that cater to the creative and artistic side. It's really really hard to marry the two (I think I'm a bit of a weird monster who straddles the two sides, but I'm not really *that* good with code so I definitely lean towards creative, but as we all learn pretty quickly, noone's gonna code my game so I simply gotta learn if I want to get my vision realised :P), so it's perfectly normal for people to do the one and not the other.
THAT SAID: it's really more the spirit of learning that should drive participation, not "winning" and "being cool" :)
GameMaker really doesn't need any coding experience to use as the interface is drag-and-drop and was originally designed by its creator for his kids to do sprite animations so it's very user friendly.
I agree that it's difficult to combine the 2 disciplines and that's why we want to alternate between an art comp and dev comp on MakeGamesSA.
I personally think the dev comps are restrictive in scope enough to give non-devs a chance to flex their dev muscles and create a worth-mentioning entry. Just like developers have to practice art constantly to get better at it, artists need to practice some development; and I truly believe GameMaker is the right tool to use.
With it being school/varsity holidays is anyone interested in a one-day intro to GameMaker in JHB?
As far as the dev side being too code heavy. I know most of us here work in video games. But the comp isn't limited to that, is it? You can design board games or card games as well. It's a bit more effort to play test so there is that issue, but it's still possible. And something I want to ask because I'm not sure about it...but we are allowed to collaborate on the dev comps, aren't we? I mean I can do some code for people if they want it, and they can do some art for me? Speak for yourself....I want to be cool :P
Yes, you're more than welcome to collaborate. Just mention the team members in the OP. Yes, you can work on multiple entries if you want.
What I've just thought of is how does the readme.txt requirement apply for web games? We have a lot more web entries this comp than before so maybe they need to have a Help/About page in their game?
And I do agree that game maker doesn't require code, but it's more the perception of it needing it that people need to get over to get into it. I know it took me a lot to get over it (and now I'm coding anyway).
It's really hard to make something cool with what I feel is a lack of experience and skills, as soon as my prototypes get to a certain point of complexity I completely lose the ability to keep track of everything and then progress becomes really painful.
I think it's related to my Starcraftalitis.
As for difficulty of code, that's a perception. One that changes as people see more games made by "non programmers" coming out of competitions like these. Plus there's absolutely nothing stopping people working on board or card games, those are actually really awesome places to concentrate gameplay. One of my fav card games, San Juan, is a concentration of the designer's previous boardgame, Puerto Rico.