Minigame Competition - Official Rule Discussion, Contains official MGC rules.

Current Discussion:
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Old Discussions:
Allow or not allow multiple entries?
Suggestions from myself:

1) The Drawing Competition Rules clearly state: Only ONE entry per member. Stick to this?
2) Allow multiple entries, but members vote for the game, rather than the member. This would lead to split votes and would reduce a members chances rather than increasing them.
3) Allowing multiple entries sounds unfair to me, since one could do two games, totally different and just catch the votes of both. A Competitor should decide which of his entries enters the competition. If a Competitor doesn't state which one he wants to send into the race, the latter one is automatically the official.

If you have other suggestions, post them in this topic.

Discuss.

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Seeing the problems in current MGC#14 and the request about official rules, I thought I'd handle that.
In the following post, I will propose rules.
If YOU are not happy with those rules, you can comment on them.

Before MGC#15 starts, these rules must be accepted by the majority of people and admins and mods and whatever is needed to make the rules official.
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Here we go:

Definition of Vocabulary
- Competitor: The person or persons who work on one entry.
- Competition Maker: The person who made the current competition.
- Competition Entry: The game of one or more persons.
- Runner-Up: Second place winner of a competition.

Minigame Competition - Basic Rules
- You are NOT allowed to use previously made engines
That includes engines of your own, tutorials, open source engines
- You are allowed to build teams of TWO
I think that making a game alone is the original sense of the competition, but there are some people who cannot sprite and some who cannot program. The competition would be accessable to those with this rule.
I made the number of team members TWO, because it would be unfair to have 5 people enter and all five getting badges.
- Duration, topic and responsibility all go to the Competition Maker.
see "The Competition Maker" for more information

The Competition Maker
- The Competition Maker is the winner of the previous Minigame Competition.
- If a person wins twice in a row, the Runner-Up is the Competition Maker.
- The Competition Maker has to define TOPIC and DURATION of the new competition.
see "Topics" and "Duration" for more information
- The Competition Maker has the full responsibility for the MGC he set up.
The Competition Maker has to PM the Badgemeister to hand out the badges for the winners of the previous competition, to have the topic stickied, to answer to people's questions, to finish the competition, to collect the entries in one post, to set up the "Final Voting Topic", to end the final voting topic.
- If the Competition Maker doesn't have the time to be responsible for the MGC at any time, he shall ask anyone, preferably the Runner-Up, to take over the responsibility until the Competition Maker returns.
- If the Competition Maker disappears without having the chance to ask anyone for taking over the responsibility, a member who has the time (preferably the Runner-Up) can do it for him. The time limit until somebody can take over the Competition is three days.

Duration
- The Competition Maker has the right to choose a limit between two weeks and two months.
Depends on the following factors: complexity of topic, time of the year (exam time, holidays, etc)
- The competition should end on Sunday midnight to give Competitors the chance to use the weekend for polishing their Entry.
- Top Five voting should be 3 days and begin with the end of the limit.
- Final Voting should take place right after the Top Five voting in a new topic which is NOT a Poll.

Topics
- The Competition Maker has the right to choose a topic.
- A topic should not be used twice.
- A topic should be wide-ranged enough to have different games and not just one same game from different people.

Game Size
- An Entry should not be bigger than 4MB.
This is better for the downloading people.
Everything you can do within those 4MB shall be allowed.
* This is not really a rule, but a guideline. If your game is bigger, it still counts.

Voting
- Top Five Voting takes place immediately after the competition finishes.
- Top Five Voting takes place in the competition topic.
- Before the Top Five Voting starts, the Competition Maker needs to collect the entries in one post and to add "VOTING TIME" to the topic's title, to make it easier for the voters.
- If the number of Entries is less than six, the Top Five Voting can be left out.
- Final Voting takes place immediately after the Top Five Voting finishes.
- Final Voting takes place in a seperate topic, created by the Competition Maker.
- You're not allowed to vote for yourself, neither in Top Five, nor in Final.

This post has been edited by Guinea on Dec 6 2008, 09:19 AM

I don't like the ending on a Sunday night(any date should do), the max duration being 2 monthes (maybe just a little less), but besides those I think I mostly agree.

These rules all sound good and reasonable, I'm just uncertain about one thing:

Who would "the Badgemeister" be, specifically? Any admin?

Medaforcer is the Badgemeister.

No. There's shouldn't be a limit. If you can get a bunch done in the given amount of time, you can do it.

Plus if it's a huge file people probably won't want to download anyway.

I'm not sure I agree with the 2MB rule. Both Kammy's Krazy Kave and Mario's Worst Nightmare were larger than that. It's not because they were huge games, they just had large files in them. (MP3 music and so on.)

Otherwise, the list sounds pretty good.

Hmm. You have a point.
But if one can't download all games, one shouldn't be allowed to vote, because he hasn't seen all games.
Plus there is the thing that a lot of people complain that the thing is called "Mini" Game Competition and not "Full Fledged" Game Competition.

Also I don't remember any games that were above 2 MB...
Not even toodles' PM2 ones. Or were they? not sure... Read previous post.

Need suggestions for other rules to limit the size.
Or should it generally be left out?

This post has been edited by Guinea on Jul 9 2006, 01:58 PM

I'm not sure about the size thing...

Also, I don't see any rules about actually voting. In the past, you haven't been allowed to vote for yourself. I don't see that rule in there anywhere. Also, can you vote for yourself in Top 5? You can in the sprite comps.

There should be no Physical Size restriction, just a size restriction on the game, so no "needs to be less than #mb" Like instaid, "no more than # frames". That'd work

MP3 music isn't at all necessary, especially in a competition like this.

nononono

If you can get a game as big as Super Mario Epic done in the time frame go for it. But that doesn't mean it's going to be as fun as a smaller game.

But that defeats the purpouse of a MINIGAME..

I agree

It kinda is when you want your entry to have the PM2 "feel" to it and there are no midis of the song you want to use.

However, I guess you're right. Midis and such keep things small.

Sooo..
I'll sum up:

So far we have complaints about:
1) The ending on Sunday night.
2) A max duration of two months
3) Size limitations.
4) Voting for yourself
Everyone agrees with the other rules though.

I think that 1) just makes it easier for the competitors.
So is there anyone else against point 1) ?
Otherwise it will stay.

About 2): This rule should allow for bigger competitions which can also be fun. With 2 months we could have better quality.
Also the 2 months limit should only be used in times when it is hard to get any time for making a game. (when there is exams, for example)
Generally, the limit should be 1 month.
Anyone not agree with me here?

About 3): I think that a physical size perfectly limits a game.
With 2MB you can do a lot of stuff, if you just don't use MP3s and huge wavs.
Limitting a game to a certain amount of frames is not such a good idea IMO. You can make a mini game with a lot of frames aswell as a huge game with only one frame.
Also, the physical size limit makes it easier to download the games later, and the voters should also be happy with the rules.

I really forgot to put 4) since I thought it was clear enough.
You're not allowed to vote for yourself, neither in Top Five, nor in Final.
Bring arguments why you would be allowed to vote for yourself in either of them and it might be considered to change that.

I'm sorry to bump this topic but I feel like I have to explain why I disagree with this rule. There is more to making games than making engines. Not everybody's good at making engines either. You can build a game with All Mario Engine, for example, and still end up with garbage if you don't put it together right. You can also build a game with platform movement and end up with an entertaining minigame that surpasses the rest. Super Mario Epic 2 is an example of platforming movement where the game is so entertaining, it doesn't matter that Jeff used platforming movement.

This rule, while good-intended, just limits who can enter the competition. I think that's something you should avoid if you want the minigame competitions to grow. If people start feeling outclassed by someone who's using All Mario Engine, they're really just going to have to step up their game and make themselves stand out. That is the purpose of a competition, after all.


Also, we've had problems with long competitions. They just drag. People stop looking at them after so long. 2 months is too much.

This post has been edited by King Bobo on Jul 13 2006, 01:24 PM

I feel if he's limiting engines made before the competition, he should limit any aspect of the game made before the competition.

This of course banishes ripped sprites, so... that leaves your alternative.

And anything other than custom music/sound effects. =P

Yes I agree.

Entrant?

Competition Host sounds much better.

Two months?! That's a gigantic damn game.

... in a reasonable amount of time, of course.

And yet not so wide-ranged that it becomes difficult to compare the games in question

You're going to give us a two-megabyte limit but let us work for two months? That's bullcrap.

And why the hell not?

Again, I'm completely disagreeing like everyone else. By not allowing already-made engines, you're hugely restricting the contest. That counts out almost every single novice imagineable.

I also have to disagree with the 2 MB rule. More developed engines would be fairly large in size. At this point, the engine alone of Luigi's Game is about 2 MB. Size can come not only from the graphics and sound, but also from the coding. If a game has a lot of complicated code work done, that'll break the 2 MB limit. You also have to factor in that people have different types of compression methods. Someone might have a game that's 2.5 MB zipped, but in .rar format, it could be below the 2 MB. It's an unfair limit that doesn't take a multitude of things into account.

If you want more people to enter minigame competitions, you want to make it as accessable as possible. The rules right now are too many and too restrictive.