On Feb 19, 2008 12:47 AM, Doug Orleans <
dougorleans@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Jorge Arroyo writes:
> I guess we have to ask ourselves, do we really care (as a community) about
> new icehouse games? If a contest is not enough to get feedback for new games
> from the community, then what is? Maybe a review contest with prizes? (I was
> actually thinking about doing something like this for the piecepack
> comunity, which suffers from the same problem: lack of feedback).
The piecepack design contest is different in that there is only one
judge, correct?
Exactly, but that means the work load for that one judge is huge, the competition takes a long time and you don't get much feedback either. I think community judged competitions are much better, if the community is interested, of course... because they can be shorter and more feedback can be generated.
> After the relative success of last competition I thought things were looking
> up, but I must say I'm pretty disappointed. It doesn't matter how creative
> we are as a designer community if we aren't able to actually playtest the
> games and offer feedback. It's bad for the games (that don't have a chance
> to get better) and bad for the designers (which don't have a chance to see
> flaws and become better designers).
It's always a struggle for me to playtest all the games. It's hard to
convince my friends to play yet another half-baked Icehouse game when
they'd rather spend their precious gaming time playing a game that is
known to be good, or at least has one person championing it, instead
of me just saying "I think this one looks like it might not be
terrible..." This time I had planned to arrange a special IGDC-only
game session, perhaps with an invitation posted to a local
meta-game-group list (Unity Games), but I never got around to it.
I guess it's similar for all of us, and I don't want to bash anyone. I was just throwing some thoughts... But basically if I have time to design a small icehouse game and expect other people to test it for me, the least I can do is test their games too
-Jorge