First of all, I also think this is a great idea and thanks Magic Sam for getting the ball rolling!
Now about the details:
@Puzzle, arcade games:
I would not exclude these types of games. There might already be a bunch of them, but if somebody has a great new idea and creates a good, fun game, why not let him participate or even win.
If it's just another puzzle like there are millions of already it will get not points in originality and won't win anyway.
@Ports:
This is a tricky point. The points given (looks more polished, etc.) are all valid, still it's a regular game and a lot of work has gone into it already.
Personally I would like to see a competition just with original homebrew, but you have to give the devs a good amount of time.
Idea: Make two deadlines, after the first one passed entries will get rated as usual and the best 10 (5?) will move into the second round where the devs have an additional month (or something like that) to polish the game, after which they will get rated again and the overall winner will be declared.
This might be a bit too much work and not worth it, but on the other hand I know how fun it is to start creating a game and how fast the first steps are taken. But after that, especially in the polishing-phase, things get very slow and dull as you only have micro-progress, which takes a huge amount of time. You could save some devs this time by separating the good from the better and only let the latter group get some additional polish.
This of course does not mean that entries should be submitted with a lot of bugs or half-way unfinished (because, you know, you still can fix that in the second phase), but nearly finished games, which just require that little-extra until completion (and maybe some feedback).
@Teams:
Great idea, I am all for it. I also have an idea (long time planned, sorry everyone who already got involved, I will finish it soon
) how to get this started and organized a bit better.
@Scoring:
I like contests where the entries are rated by "professionals" better as people can get a better feedback than just a number (you can't really judge what went wrong when you only have the % of people who voted for your entry).
That's also what bugs me about "contests" like America's idol (or similar), it's not the best one winning, but the most popular/good looking/etc. one (apart from the fact that it's rigged anyway).
So assemble a team of 8-10 judges and make them write a small review (overall or category based) about every entry, that way developers get a real feedback (not just numbers) on their stuff they can use to improve their work.
I know this is much more work, but in the end it is worth it - the review also does not need to be long or can be bullet points, it just should be clear where the pros and cons were.
@Alex' idea:
Great, do that if possible! It promotes quality over quantity and also helps devs who did not win "hey, I submitted an entry to this contest, it was good, but sadly did not win, still I got a price".
It's like a consolidation price and helps people getting out with a good feeling.
@Bonus points:
I don't like them and would drop them all.
Bonus points are always a tricky part, they are mostly awarded by free will (which seems unfair) or they are defined by some fixed agenda, which mostly is not fair either as some entries simply cannot apply to them.
Sure it would be nice to see the Pandora's full potential used, but does that make a good game? A good game also does not need to use the touchscreen or mic-input.
That are just gimmicks, which should be rewarded by points in the "technique" or "originality" categories.
A good game should be an experience, this can mean it was fun to play or did suck one in with a good story or did emotionally touch one or made one think about certain points or or or (multiple points may and should apply, too).
This experience can hardly be rated at an ordinal scale as it can be quite different. So you have to make the categories apply to the different kinds of possible experiences, which makes them broad or vague. These fixed bonus points are exactly the opposite and simply cannot be applied to all of the possible entries.
I also would like to give a personal story concerning this (so skip that part if you are not interested):
I am organizing a contest at my ex-school every year. It is about there LEGO robots (Mindstorms or NXT - you probably have already heard about them) having to solve certain objectives. Teams of 4-10 pupils (up to the age of 16) have several months to examine the objectives, making a plan and finally building, programming and testing a robot which will then try to solve as many of the 10-15 objectives as possible is 150 seconds (it's nearly impossible to solve all of them). For more details see this page:
http://www.hands-on-technology.de/en
Anyway, after the NXT-system was introduced by LEGO, the old Mindstorms system was awarded extra points, because it was more inaccurate and did not have as many features (which is totally true).
The problem was, that despite the inferiority of the old system it did not matter that much in the actual game making the teams using the Mindstorms system score nearly as much points as team using the NXT system and getting an additional bonus on top.
Long story short, it's very hard to define fair and balanced conditions for bonus points and if you don't do that the judging gets unfair and intransparent.
td;dr:
Exclusion of puzzle/arcade games: Bad
Exclusion of ports: good
Teams: good
Scoring: Judges over public voting
Alex' idea: Good
Bonus points: Bad
Thanks again for setting this up (and thanks for reading that wall of test), I am up to helping as much as I can, starting with an unoffical blog coverage as this event goes live.
foxblock out
