Yeah the ultimate aim of the game jam is to promote OGA and OGA art.
Obviously, though for the contestants the goal is to make the best game possible.
Adding Challenge/Theme to the voting criteria does seem to work at cross purpose with that. Should you try to make the best game or use the most art from the challenges? I think the general idea is to shoot for the former, but the voting criteria actually tilts a bit toward the later (two categories for 'theme' and 'challenge' vs one for 'playability').
Two ideas for solutions:
1) Split the two up. Add a separate award for the 'theme' and 'challenge' stuff and make it completely indepedent from the overal 'best game' award.
This could replace the OGA favorite award, if we're worried about there being too many awards.
2) Make use of the challenge art mandatory.
So something like: submissions must use at least 6 OGA assets including at least 2 from one of the previous year's art challenges. For theme, game must fit theme of at least one of the previous year's art challenges.
Of these two, I almost prefer the 2nd. It's more rigid than the current totally open contest, but on the other hand, it's still pretty flexibile. The themes themselves are fairly broad and IIRC some folks were requesting a theme because it gave them some where to start instead of a totally blank canvas.
I guess for theme the idea would be state which theme (or themes) you were going for and then voters can rate you according to how well they think you hit it.
yeah I am a big fan of the art jams. They are actually a better fit OGA than the game jams.
I just had a little trouble connecting the two this year.
One solution that occurs to me, is to put the onus for getting 'theme' and 'challenge' stars on the submitter. So if you want the points, then you've got to explicitly state which assets you used from which challenges. Ditto for themes. Makes it a little harder on the submitter, but saves everyone else the trouble of investigating this stuff themselves.
Thursday, August 16, 2018 - 14:33
perfect for when the user hits 'start new game' on a title menu.
These are awesome! I'm guessing they were a lot of fun to record too!
thanks for sharing!
Thursday, August 16, 2018 - 14:07
@chasersgaming:
I couldn't disagree more with that idea. Other than CC0, it's in the text of all these licenses that you must provide credit including a link to the original work. I don't think we should be doing anything that signals that it's ok to not do this or be loose about how it's done.
I think Spring's hang up was making the link something you can click on. I do support dropping the text about that. It's strictly an optional 'nice to have' feature and seems to have caused some confusion.
I think there's got to be a better way to handle the 'theme' and 'challenge' bits. I love the idea of linking the game and art challenges, but I think we either need to make the connection stronger (eg. require assets from the challenges be used) or toss it altogether. As it was, I found it very hard to rate these two categories this year.
Ok, now that I'm at a keyboard, let me add my one bit of advice for anyone coming to video game music from elsewhere: cut to the chase!
Long 10-30 seconds build ups work great for other music forms, but in the video game world you've typically got about 0-5 seconds for the main melody to kick in, with a heavy preference on 0.
This is especialy true for title themes, most gamers try to get out of title menus as quickly as possible, so if you want to them to hear any of your hard made music you've got to get it started as quickly as possible.
There's a little more room to play around with in-game music, but the same general idea holds. Picture a 'Village theme' song that plays in the background when a player enters a town in a fantasy RPG. The song needs to set the tone and pace for the player to make feel like they are walking around an medevial village. It can't take 30 or even 10 seconds to do this, the player needs to feel transported to the village pretty much from the moment the scene opens. A player will probably spend longer in the village then a title menu, so there's a little more room to play around before getting to the meat of the song, but not too much.
Not a comment on any of the tracks you've made specifcally, just a general pointer I like to hand out.
anyway, looks like you are off to a good start with both the games and game music. Good luck and happy travels! :)
Yeah the ultimate aim of the game jam is to promote OGA and OGA art.
Obviously, though for the contestants the goal is to make the best game possible.
Adding Challenge/Theme to the voting criteria does seem to work at cross purpose with that. Should you try to make the best game or use the most art from the challenges? I think the general idea is to shoot for the former, but the voting criteria actually tilts a bit toward the later (two categories for 'theme' and 'challenge' vs one for 'playability').
Two ideas for solutions:
1) Split the two up. Add a separate award for the 'theme' and 'challenge' stuff and make it completely indepedent from the overal 'best game' award.
This could replace the OGA favorite award, if we're worried about there being too many awards.
2) Make use of the challenge art mandatory.
So something like: submissions must use at least 6 OGA assets including at least 2 from one of the previous year's art challenges. For theme, game must fit theme of at least one of the previous year's art challenges.
Of these two, I almost prefer the 2nd. It's more rigid than the current totally open contest, but on the other hand, it's still pretty flexibile. The themes themselves are fairly broad and IIRC some folks were requesting a theme because it gave them some where to start instead of a totally blank canvas.
I guess for theme the idea would be state which theme (or themes) you were going for and then voters can rate you according to how well they think you hit it.
yeah I am a big fan of the art jams. They are actually a better fit OGA than the game jams.
I just had a little trouble connecting the two this year.
One solution that occurs to me, is to put the onus for getting 'theme' and 'challenge' stars on the submitter. So if you want the points, then you've got to explicitly state which assets you used from which challenges. Ditto for themes. Makes it a little harder on the submitter, but saves everyone else the trouble of investigating this stuff themselves.
perfect for when the user hits 'start new game' on a title menu.
thanks for sharing!
this is awesome!
Viking ships and that serpent are a great touch!
Thanks for sharing!
These are awesome! I'm guessing they were a lot of fun to record too!
thanks for sharing!
@chasersgaming:
I couldn't disagree more with that idea. Other than CC0, it's in the text of all these licenses that you must provide credit including a link to the original work. I don't think we should be doing anything that signals that it's ok to not do this or be loose about how it's done.
I think Spring's hang up was making the link something you can click on. I do support dropping the text about that. It's strictly an optional 'nice to have' feature and seems to have caused some confusion.
I think there's got to be a better way to handle the 'theme' and 'challenge' bits. I love the idea of linking the game and art challenges, but I think we either need to make the connection stronger (eg. require assets from the challenges be used) or toss it altogether. As it was, I found it very hard to rate these two categories this year.
Love this set, thanks for sharing!
and because I just can't get enough of that Sega Master System action, here's this set ported to the SMS palette.
I call them 'fanfares' but I'm not sure where I got that term so it may or may not be a real one. :)
Ok, now that I'm at a keyboard, let me add my one bit of advice for anyone coming to video game music from elsewhere: cut to the chase!
Long 10-30 seconds build ups work great for other music forms, but in the video game world you've typically got about 0-5 seconds for the main melody to kick in, with a heavy preference on 0.
This is especialy true for title themes, most gamers try to get out of title menus as quickly as possible, so if you want to them to hear any of your hard made music you've got to get it started as quickly as possible.
There's a little more room to play around with in-game music, but the same general idea holds. Picture a 'Village theme' song that plays in the background when a player enters a town in a fantasy RPG. The song needs to set the tone and pace for the player to make feel like they are walking around an medevial village. It can't take 30 or even 10 seconds to do this, the player needs to feel transported to the village pretty much from the moment the scene opens. A player will probably spend longer in the village then a title menu, so there's a little more room to play around before getting to the meat of the song, but not too much.
Not a comment on any of the tracks you've made specifcally, just a general pointer I like to hand out.
anyway, looks like you are off to a good start with both the games and game music. Good luck and happy travels! :)
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