Both the Art & the Code portions of the contest will be announced at the same time, I'm guessing?

Thanks for the heads up.

Good to know -- thanks for the heads-up. Will there be a central place where we can download and try all the entries? I know I'm not the only one that's paranoid that mine didn't submit properly. :-)

Thanks for putting this all together!

Hi bart,

With respects to your private life (Life can be crazy sometimes),

Have you got an estimated percentage of what is done so far about the LPC judging?

Or maybe the work and/or difficulties done and seen so far?

Best regards,

A status update would be very nice.

I personally would be fully ok with it if you postponed the judging to much later, such as September 30th, given that you are volunteering this, there is a huge number of games and very much art to judge, and that several games are difficult to build and run. I have personally had trouble with getting many of the non-html5 games to build and run.

I also think that using a VM for running the games on is a very good idea, and that if you hold the competition again, giving out a VM file at the start of the competition and requiring that the game runs on that VM file following the exact instructions given by the game installation files would be a very good idea. That should help with the building trouble, not just for you but also for others who try to build and run the games. That does make it harder for the game developers, but I definitely think it should be the responsibility of the game developers to ensure that the game builds and runs without any issues, since it is harder for people other than the game developers to fix the issues.

Hi bart,

I can sincerely imagine the time it can take when one wants to do it properly.

Good luck on finishing that.

Let me thank you for all the work you are doing on the judging, especially given the unexpected magnitude of the task.

As I also tell people who  do stuff for me, take your time, do it right!

And I hope you're having fun.

So any progress or updates on the judging for the code entries?

Are we going to have a winner before the end of the year (nice christmas suprise for someone) or is it just not going to happen?

What is the status of judgement of the games? How many games have been judged?

If it is not too bothersome, I would also like to know the procedure used for judging the games. There might be ways to speed it up, and given your limited resources, that may not be a bad idea.

/crickets

This is getting beyond ridiculous.

Code entries were posted on 2012-08-02 - 5, nearly 6 months ago.

I wonder how many of the people who entered still actually bother to check this site?

I check it, every day :)

It's just my soap opera kind of curiosity.

It's really bothersome, because I think they did decently or great in arranging 90% of the competition, but the judging of the games just failed. I believe they were surprised by the large number of entries, they didn't have enough time, and I assume that their judging procedure wasn't designed to scale to such a large number of entries. I believe they naturally want to be thorough given the size of the prizes, and their procedure would probably have been fine with a low number of entries. Another thing that requires even more time is having to get entries running, which is often non-trivial.

I think most of the issues can be solved for a potential next competition, given that there is a lot of experience now, and people know what works and what doesn't. I am also considering volunteering to be a judge for the next competition instead of participating (especially if the judging procedure is improved, and I have some ideas for that), but I cannot really volunteer for being a judge in this competition given that I am participating in it.

I check my email every day, and I've set the relevant forums to notify me when anything is posted.  So, indirectly, I do check this forum every day.  My hat is off to the judges; they must be having a difficult time.  I can't imagine how they can get it all done quickly.  I'm now retired, and I can't imagine having the time to get all these games running mysef.  All I can advise them is, take your time, do it right.

I'm patient.

From time to time I play my game for a few minutes (it takes maybe ten minutes) and enjoy myself.  Maybe I'll get around to developing my game further someday.  If so, where should I post it when it's more ready?  And does anyone have any recommendations what else I should do with it?

That's ok, please keep us up to date on your progress.

Periodic updates would've been great.

If you had posted that statement earlier - that some/most of the judges had backed out - that would've explained a lot of the delay.

The real issue is now a (permanent) loss of confidence in the competition.

Going forward, if opengameart were to run another LPC - for example later this year - you can see that people could be hesitant to enter the competition.

Heck, you might even run into trouble with funding/sponsorship, who knows.

With the judges backing out and it being just you two, I can easily see how the judging got so delayed. I still believe a new LPC can be held in the future, especially if the reasons for the last competition's delays are clearly communicated, and maybe held at a smaller scale to make it easier to manage (you could leave out the monetary prize out for games and let the prize just be winning the games competition). And given that 90% of the competition went decently or great IMO, there isn't much that needs fixing. But this can all be considered once 2014 comes around.

One upside to the delay to the next competition is that the programmers that participated will have a lot of time to create and improve game development tools, which is something that is generally lacking on Linux. The FOSS engine and IDE I used in the last competition (enigma-dev.org and lateralgm.org) have matured a lot since the competition was held, and I believe they will have matured a lot more once the next competition comes around. And with better game development tools, it should be easier to develop and deploy games for Linux.

Many game compos get around the pain of judging games by letting the ones with the most interest  in the results (the contestants) do the judging.

The downside is that games that are difficult to build/run will not get a fair assessment.  Maybe that could spur everyone to make their games easier to run.

@HendrikBoom3 I don't know the game you have done but if you have a repo. somewhere (I mean using an scm like subversion, mercurial or git)  you can go on committing in it. If not, this would be a perfect opportunity to create one and if you do not know then learning to create one and use it and announce what you are doing once in a while to get feedback from others to see if they find it interesting or not and basically engage with people. 

Look forward to know more about your game and where you are taking it further.

There are ways to get the contestants to vote on other entries...by making the contestants judging 'results' public (essentially reviews with pre-specified categories and a rating scale), excluding them from judging their own entries etc etc. I've seen it done in other coding competitions and it could certainly work here.

The bigger issues is making all the entries available to all the judges though. I haven't played all the games, because I am not going to muck around trying to get them to work. If *I* were to run a competition like this I would standardize it on one platform. (Probably html5+javascript) It's nice to have a competition were you can just go and build a game and use whatever (open source) language and library you want, but you can see the issues it created when it came to running and judging the games.

Of course it also depends on what the goal of the (next) competition would be:

- increase quality and quantity of art available on opengameart

- create open source games showing off opengameart assets

- create open source *linux* games showing off opengameart assets

I agree that letting general people vote on projects that include monetary rewards is likely to be a bad idea or difficult to manage properly. Either way, no monetary rewards with public votes sounds to me like a good option, since it should make managing the competition much easier, and (I believe) will still attract people to make entries. I would personally still be interested in participating with a game if there is no monetary reward.

I would not like being forced to develop games in just html5+javascript. I think requiring each game entry to build perfectly on a VM image that is given well ahead of the game portion of the competition should fix the issues with building and running the games. Disqualifying games that do not build or run on such a VM image is entirely fair, because the amount of time the game developer(s) has to spend on getting it working on the VM is dwarfed by the amount of time interested players may spend on trying to get it to work. And with a whole month, there is plenty of time to get things set up properly. And points can always be given for easily running the games on other platforms.

Good points, I don't like restricting the choice of language/platform either, but it makes judging and running the games so much easier that it's almost a no-brainer.

The VM still has issues. Was it an 8Gb image? Bear in mind that some of us have broadband caps and download speed that wouldn't allow for that size. (Not all of us live in the US ;)

Without the monetary reward you will see a drastic drop in the number of participants, and for those of us on tight financial budgets it is a great (motivational) incentive to keep working on our entries  :)

You are right, the VM image was definitely large (and 8Gb sounds right). One possible solution to that would be to let others try and help with building the game, but that is not a very practical solution. In effect, it would probably split participants into two groups: those who can download such a VM image, and can then compete with both native as well as html5+javascript, and those who cannot download such a VM image, and thus is limited to html5+javascript. But if the games competition has two categories, native and html5+javascript, I think that solution would be ok.

I am not convinced that there would be a drastic drop in the number of participants without the monetary reward. And even if there is a substantial drop, getting even more consistent art that follows the LPC graphics style would be a win in itself. It would also benefit existing games that use LPC art. That said, I think you are right that a monetary reward is generally a good thing, but I think it would be a better idea to experiment with monetary rewards for games only when the competition is more established.

In my opinion, the onus should be on the developer to make a buildable game.  I can't find the thread but it was stated that all games should build and run on current Ubuntu.  If an entry doesn't build then it should receive a low or zero score.  (With the caveat that we all make mistakes so extra build instructions can be added in the few days after entering.)

I am not convinced that there would be a drastic drop in the number of participants without the monetary reward. And even if there is a substantial drop, getting even more consistent art that follows the LPC graphics style would be a win in itself. It would also benefit existing games that use LPC art.

That is only if future LPC entries follow the same styleguide, which in my opinion, should not happen. Assetts built using the current LPC style guide are extremly ineffecient; as with the LPC rules, the style guide should be refined to produce more consistant and useable entries.

I don't know if I'd say they're 'inefficient,' per se, but they can definitely be time-consuming to make.  While we didn't end up having any trouble getting a lot of good quality (and stylistically consistent) assets entered into the contest, I think that some elements of the style guide, especially the frame count on the base animations, add a bit of a barrier to entry.  I think we've learned quite a bit from the process, and if there's another LPC it will probably be different; but that's just my thought, not something official.

Maybe in the future prize money should only be for the artwork portion of the contest.  That is what this site is about, right?

I think most programmers would still show up to compete using the great artwork created even if no prize money was offered.  I know I would.

It would be a shame if this was the last LPC due to the problems with awarding cash prizes to the game entries.

Hi,

I do think that to see the games done with the different assets was the most exciting part of it all. Prize or not, I do like what happened at that moment.

Also, programming isn't something easy, just as making art, and I do believe that it should be worth something.

Thirdly, the different games made, raised up the lack minor things missing in the assets, and permitted to 'test' the useability of the different sprites.

For all those reasons, I do think the coding phase should stay. Look, people, it was the first time OGA did such a thing, and it grew up much farther than what was expected, explaining the time it's taking.

Let's give them the time to finish, and I do think they'll be much more prepared the next time.

Regards,

Just my 2 pennies but...

Why don't you make a simple site, a time period for people to enter a link to their project with a description.

Then a time period for people to go through the list and download the games.

Then just look at statistics of which games received the most downloads?

Just provide a well crafted capcha to stop people spamming.

 feel free to replace 'you' with 'we'

Ps. I am new here.

Disclaimer: Just a user not a judge :)

@ bluelightzero

Just having number of downloads would not be a good criteria. Just having number of downloads does not guarantee that it will be good. If I were a judging person I would say some 'good' guidelines are :-

a. Have a repo. :- People who make games and have a repo. going should be awarded. (say +5 points) rather than those who just dump a .tar.gz file somewhere.

b. Have a sane make system - If the game uses .configure,cmake,qmake,make or any of half-dozen easily available compilation tools (+5 points) for that. Maybe couple of points if your game is able to use a slightly older version of whatever build system you are using (so that more people can compile)

c. Have a readme and have all dependencies :- We all know that the GNU/Linux world is based on dependencies. If you have a readme which lists all the dependencies that should also attract (+5 points).

d. Does the game run (the more games are able to run/execute) on more systems (+5 points) to the developer.

e. Using common libraries :- The more common the libraries you use (which means the more a library is used/packaged in more platforms) it should be given more points.

f. Some basic QA :- If the developer does some basic QA (no memory leakage etc.) they should be given (+5) points.

So in short, the thing I guess is that our judges were lenient on all above. If they had made mandatory to follow the above guidelines it's possible more games would have been more easily built ( or at least that's my opinion/understanding etc.) than what u see today.

What could be done in the future is also to involve the users (i.e. we) to rate on the above. This should result in added incentive for the developers to take more care and can be a good influencer for games that at least get built and run. It might take a bit more code for Bart to enable this but once this is done, the above could be done transparently so that there is no vote-stacking or anything like that. 

Now just having a game built and run is half the game, the rest would be about game mechanics, atmosphere, immersion and maybe another half-a-dozen factors which I haven't gone into and which is/would perhaps be matter of taste etc.

I know it's easier to say that this would have been easier but then it would require bart and other devs. of OGA to contribute both time and code as well as bit of QA to see if it's feasible and renders well.

The good point is if something like above gets done, this could be also used for all and any future games (without the contest) and should give devs. at least some feedback they can understand.

Till l8er. 

@Bart and other devs. of the site, waiting for what u think of the above idea. I know it could be argued (at least for e. that it would kill innovation) but then that I guess would apply for everything as well.