This contest, which was designed to showcase the community's RPGM3 users' skill at creating interesting and fun minigames despite the software's supposed limitations, began on December 2, 2008, and ended on January 18, 2009, with one extension given for one entrant. The categories the entries were being judged by were Originality, Tech Proficiency, Fun Factor, and Aesthetics. Each was worth 25 points, for a total possible score of 100.
One entrant seemed to focus mostly on aesthetics, with one of his two entries completely shattering my expectations of what was possible using the software. Another seemed to focus his energies on the technical details, and the third had no real standout categories, but instead seemed to abide by the axiom, "Slow and steady wins the race."
In my eyes as a game designer who uses RPGM3, and considers minigames his specialty, I chose as the sole judge to deem the Tech Proficiency category as the tiebreaker. As I judged the games, in writing the reviews, I assigned a point total to each category, but did not add up the points until the very end, lest I knew the scores of the games I played earlier, and then padded or decreased the score of a later game if I thought it was more or less "deserving" of winning. This was, I thought, the only fair way of judging, as I was the sole judge. After tallying the totals, it turned out that two games were tied for second, which ordinarily would not have been a problem, as I had already set up a tiebreaker category. Problem was, both of the games tied for second had exactly the same (pretty poor) score for this category.
So I threw it out to the entrants to rank the remaining three categories in order of importance to them, assigning a value of 3, 2, or 1 to each. The consensus was that Fun Factor would become the tiebreaker category.
The results are as follows:
Wavelength's Hell's Dining Room came in first, with a score of 88 out of 100.
Pagerron's Secret Agent X came in second after the second tiebreaker with a score of 63 out of 100.
Lausen's Animal Dash came in third after the second tiebreaker, also with a score of 63 out of 100.
The full reviews are posted here, in the contest forum.
One entrant seemed to focus mostly on aesthetics, with one of his two entries completely shattering my expectations of what was possible using the software. Another seemed to focus his energies on the technical details, and the third had no real standout categories, but instead seemed to abide by the axiom, "Slow and steady wins the race."
In my eyes as a game designer who uses RPGM3, and considers minigames his specialty, I chose as the sole judge to deem the Tech Proficiency category as the tiebreaker. As I judged the games, in writing the reviews, I assigned a point total to each category, but did not add up the points until the very end, lest I knew the scores of the games I played earlier, and then padded or decreased the score of a later game if I thought it was more or less "deserving" of winning. This was, I thought, the only fair way of judging, as I was the sole judge. After tallying the totals, it turned out that two games were tied for second, which ordinarily would not have been a problem, as I had already set up a tiebreaker category. Problem was, both of the games tied for second had exactly the same (pretty poor) score for this category.
So I threw it out to the entrants to rank the remaining three categories in order of importance to them, assigning a value of 3, 2, or 1 to each. The consensus was that Fun Factor would become the tiebreaker category.
The results are as follows:
Wavelength's Hell's Dining Room came in first, with a score of 88 out of 100.
Pagerron's Secret Agent X came in second after the second tiebreaker with a score of 63 out of 100.
Lausen's Animal Dash came in third after the second tiebreaker, also with a score of 63 out of 100.
The full reviews are posted here, in the contest forum.
I'll take a look at them and release the game today.
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