philhassey on 2007/04/23 20:31:

... which is why I wonder why teams and individuals are split up ... but, whatever ;)

RB[0] on 2007/04/24 02:40:

highest production actually goes to TeamXerian of Pyweek1, with 4.91 ;)

HanClinto on 2007/04/24 13:27:

Philhassey: You just say that becuase you place well in all of the PyWeeks. :) Some of us lower-types like splitting the competition up, because it's hard for someone like me to compete against something like the olde battle axe.

I personally wouldn't mind if we had more awards, and more official recognition of achievement. It's so easy to get caught up in the negative feedback received, where we feel like we aren't getting anywhere, and that nobody likes our games. A little mocking or discouragement goes a long way in the comments (especially considering they're coming from peers). I certainly don't want to tell everyone that they did perfectly or something merely to boost their self-esteem -- that's lame. But I still think we should recognize achievement where significant achievement is made. "Best first-time entry" or "Most fun game" or "Best graphics" or "Most original gameplay" or something to make it more like the Academy Awards and less like an X-Prize "all or nothing" sort of competition. Seriously -- imagine if the Oscars just had a 1st and 2nd place, for all of the movies released that year -- where's the motivation to create if you've got something like that?

philhassey on 2007/04/24 23:04:

"Philhassey: You just say that becuase you place well in all of the PyWeeks." - that's not why I say that, actually - it's just always been my opinion. :) Anyway, after reading the other reasons here, I must concede the point. Having them divided up is good, and having awards for each category is good. And having an overall award is good as well :)

For my personally, I use the ratings and feedback as a way to improve my game development. Learning how to increase your rating is a great way to learn how to build better games. Here's a bit of a pyweek post-mortem from me on game objectives:

pyweek1 - My local team made the game, and luck have it, it came out good :) Though it was hard work!
pyweek2 - I tried doing a team compo with illume and some other folks, it didn't go so well, because we didn't have a very organized vision, and being a distributed team made that even harder!
pyweek3 - I really wanted to make an adventure game - so having that clear vision and going back to the local team was real good for this one. The game came out just how I wanted it :)
pyweek4 - I really wanted to make a mario3 clone - again, a clear vision, in particular - one that was easy to communicate to others, made it possible to have a global team this time. The game came out considerably better than I expected due to the excellent work done by the team. (Though our compo release levels were weak due to running out of time.)
pyweek5 - The last two compos I've placed well, but have had marginal innovation scores - obviouslly because I've made clones of existing games just to satisfy my inner desire to make those games (for whatever reason). I'm think it's about time I tried to place high in the innovation category!

Anyway - no promises, but I think there's a good chance that I'll be trying to increase innovation in the future. I really think building a game that gets both high fun marks and high innovation marks is one of the biggest challenges :)

Some general tips -
- if you want to get a higher score, make sure your game has good production. From what I see in scoring, good production makes the gameplay experience funner, and rubs off onto your innovation category just because.
- make sure the game is fun, no matter what! In particular, make it simple. When judging, a person will typically have to play 50+ games. Given that, I usually give a game a 1-3 minute chance to get me interested in the game. If I'm not interested I give up and move on. Make sure people are immediately engaged by the game. Simple obvious gameplay with immediate rewards is esseintial.
- in the case of a more sophisticated game, there is a trick to the 1-3 minute "attention grabber" - make the game look good, so people will be willing to give it more time, and build in a tutorial that teaches you how to play the game. If the tutorial takes 10 minutes, that's okay, because I'm generally willing to learn something more complicated if the developer has spent the time to teach me. If I just have a text file explaining complex relationships between goals in the game and a bunch of weird controls, I won't bother. -- Great example of doing it this correctly was: http://www.pyweek.org/e/Biscuit_Games/ -- without a tutorial, I would have given up in a minute. The tutorial got me into the game and I played it for at least an hour!
- back to the 1-3 minute guide: if you have grabbed the players attention for 3 minutes, and you've convinced them that your game is good, you can count on them to play your game for around 20 more minutes. In my pyweek3 "Wiljafjord" adventure game - I made sure that the game could be beaten by an average gamer in about 25 minutes, because I figured people would get annoyed if the game were longer or more difficult. That was a weakness of "Bubble Kong" - we didn't reserve enough time to build levels, so some of the ones in the compo release were rather too hard or bothersome.
- leads me to the point: make the game easy at first! Hard games aren't fun until you've mastered the easy bits ... and like the game so much that you *want* to be challenged. (Basically, the same as above 1-3 minutes to get people into the game - 20 minutes total.)

Yikes - I rambled a bit, but hopefully those tips will be useful to someone :)

- Phil

RB[0] on 2007/04/26 18:52:

Well, I haven't done too much work with online coding, but I could try :)

Also, I am going to be working on trophy graphics anyway, so I will try my hand at a few for pyweek.