looking for competition judges

News & General Discussion
1

Seeking two or more judges to judge a small unofficial unity programmer competition.

My proposal is that a small 72 HR game competition be held. Placement will be based and judged on pure technical merit. Art assets to be supplied by me. All competition submissions to become public domain. Prizes of small denomination to be awarded, e.g. $50 American express gift card for first place, $25 for 2nd, etc. Prizes to be paid out of my personal funds.

I ask for judges as I will not be judging myself. Hey, you all know my temperament when it comes to evaluating others.

Judges are barred from entering. Judges will be expected to evaluate all approved submissions. Judges will be required to write a brief summary (which will be a minimum of 100 words per approved entry of the technical merit and technical shortcomings). Judges will be required to be both proficient programmers and proficient Unity users.
Details of what constitutes an approved submission to be worked out in advance of the competition along with the exact competition details and deadline.

Judges will be compensated each with a $50 American express gift or equivalent asset store purchase.

Dman, hippocoder and gepetto (sp?): You are competent, would you be willing to put your names forward as judges?

Errors and omissions excepted.
Void where prohibited.
Author of this post legally binds himself to an expenditure for prizes and remunerations not to exceed $250 total.

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Reserved for future

3

Are you allowed to be an un-official judge? that meaning play what people produce and just give general thread feedback? Id love to apply as a judge but im all art side and dont programme, would just be fun to see and evaluate what people do.

In otherwords I am just asking whether the games produced are up for public play or not :slight_smile:

-Charlie

4

To answer your direct question: Yes, you will be able to offer critical feedback. Part of the competition rules would be that all submissions to the competition enter the public domain, i.e. code must be released.

To answer questions you did not ask: :slight_smile:

These aren’t going to be huge games, probably a few hundred lines of code so I don’t imagine anyone having an issue with creating something for the good of the community and potentially getting a nominal reward for it. I really want the games to be a learning experience of how different programmers solve various problems.

Commentary from non-judges should be welcomed, though I would like to avoid, but cannot prevent, the “nice game!” one line comments. I am thinking, and feel free to weigh in here with suggestions, that each game will get its own forum thread once it is submitted, with a tag in the thread title of [COMPETITION] so that they can be easily found.

I will have created a standard set of artwork so that the technical people won’t have to worry about producing artwork for their games. The art assets will be geared at a very specific, very simple game that can be easily produced inside of 72 hours.

It will be up to the individual programmer to use the art assets in any way they see fit so long as all supplied art assets are implemented in the game as an active game element.

Exact details to be worked out but the competition rules will probably forbid adding extra artwork that cannot be generated through pure Unity 3D code – ergo shaders would be okay, procedural textures would be okay, but brand new 3D models created in Maya and textures in Photoshop would not. This will hopefully prevent the judges from being swayed by “ooh! Shiny!” graphics from someone who is artistically inclined but technically unable to deliver.

There will be restrictions on certain tools that can be used by the submissions, i.e. it should be possible to develop and run the game on the indie version of Unity3D, and it should not require any paid-for plugins such as SpriteManager. Nothing against SpriteManager, but I don’t want someone having an obvious unfair advantage because they could afford the license fee but their competition could not. All code should be able to be released to the public domain or freely and easily downloadable from a public website, so Stateless project would be acceptable, iTween would also be acceptable, but SpriteManager would not.

I want to gate the competition so that it is promoted about two or four weeks before release so programmers have plenty of time to find out about the competition, the rules are published well ahead of time, a submissions process can be created that is fair, the exact details of what is to be created and the art assets are released, the games are submitted, 72 hours pass for the judges to look them over, and then finally, the submissions are released to the public.

5

I would be happy to help judge, I don’t need anything for it, I am just happy to bring the experience to the table, so count me in.

6

I’d be happy to be a judge. Although if I don’t make the judges panel I’ll definitely be an entrant.

7

I would be well up for entering this, sounds fun :slight_smile:

8

Great initiative! Count me in!

9

Things proceed.

As soon as we have a passel of judges we can work out the exact details of what can be done. It will only be a 72 hour competition so the art assets and game style should reflect that restriction.

I want the competition to be fun, fun, fun, but I also want it to be fair and above all, a solid contribution to the community so that people can look at the game code and figure out how something was done. I think it would be of huge value to aspiring programmers to see how various people approached problems. I know I learn the most looking at somebody’s code and how they solved a particular problem. I am sure other programmers do too. I think the competition submissions would offer a nice piece of knowledge that can be referenced.

We can stick the various submissions up on the wiki for more permanence and a usable reference. I am sure other people can come up with better ideas than that. Mash ups, collaborations, an eBook of solutions, an Asset Store package of code snippets or complete games, etc. Remember, the results will be in the public domain, so its not like anybody can take your work and suddenly make a ton of money from it, because the moment someone attempts that, you can just take their work and do the same thing.

I would also like to keep it in a very open format, both for specifying the rules, judging and showing off of the submissions and code with some strong guidelines (for example, not using paid for plug-ins) to make it enjoyable for everyone involved. The only secrecy in the endeavour will be “what art assets do we get” which nobody but me and the artist will know until the very minute of release, and then what the submissions are to the competition until after the judges have handed in their judgements so that the judges aren’t swayed by popular opinion or late fixes that are done after the judging has begun.

I think some of the criteria for an acceptable submission, and everybody should feel free to throw in opinion and suggestions, are:

  1. Does it run? (yes/no)
  2. Does it work without throwing an exception, crashing the game, or otherwise blow up to an unplayable state? (yes/no)
  3. Does it use all of the art assets (audio and graphics)? (yes/no)
  4. Does it use all of the art assets properly? (more subjective)
  5. Does it compile and run inside of Unity3D indie? (yes/no)
  6. Does it use paid-for plugins? (yes/no)

And I think some of the criteria for judging would be:

  1. Is the code clean and well presented? (subjective)
  2. Does the code cover a complete game? (splash, menu, game play, game over, start again, etc)
  3. Does the code make good use of Unity3D features?