6th Quest Invitational

[ZoriaRPG]

If you want to ask @War Lord and open it up, be my guest. But we need to find a host that's willing to play 25+ entries.

Also, I agree if we package it in we have to go open.

It's not monotonius, it's just more work than I can handle when I got other things to do. I heard you hosted a contest once, you know, now imagine that with quests as difficult as James Quest, times 25 or 30 of them..........

-James

(Emphasis, mine.)

Hence, you do not see me chomping at the bit to do it again. :p

That thing turned into a trainwreck because (1) I was too lenient in mediating between contest rules and wishes of the participants, and (2) running into a work-related conundrum that ate away at my free time in December and January, or January and February. (Probably all three.)

Trying to balance all of that was an administrative pain in the arse, but keep in mind that I was not judging the entries. They were community judged, which might give a more fair bias on what to select, or it might lead to general chaos. If I were to host a contest to make a quest pack, i would do it in stages.

Allow four ( to six, based on assets requirements ) months to create all the entries. Pre-designed original assets would be allowed, and this initial time window is purely for submission, so authors who already have custom assets, such as @Aevin, would have an edge toward generating a package if they desire to submit one.

I believe that is sufficient time to create a graphics package, find or record audio, and find music; write or assemble sets of scripts, and generally make it work along with a small playable demo. Add two months to the end of this for general handling of evaluation, rejection, and community evaluation; then one more month for finals, for a total of about nine months. That just...seems fitting for something of this scale.

After authors send packages:

1. Check the entries for general quality, and adherence to the standards set for them. Remove any that violate rules, either rejecting-and-returning them to the author for revision, or simply removing them if they are plain awful or ignored critical rules.

2. Allow authors who did not meet the requirements within the allotted time, a possible a 30-day grace to fix any issues, re-evaluate if the package merits it. This would cover, as an example, rejections because of copyrighted music, or a few loose objects, but not if they simply ripped assets out of a bunch of Touhou games and called them 'original '.

3. Pass the entries into a public voting pool. This, assuming there are enough: perhaps more than ten, or more than two that fit any single theme category. After the community votes on them, go through the user feedback, and decide which to deselect. If a category only has one package, it would become the default. For this, I imaging the following groups:

NES Adventure, 4-colour
NES RPG, 4 colour
NES Sidescroller, 4-colour
NES Metroidvania, 4-colour
NES Puzzle, 4-colour
NES SHMUP (V), 4-colour
NES SHMUP (H), 4-colour
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SNES Adventure, 16 colour
SNES RPG, 16 colour
SNES Sidescroller, 16 colour
SNES Metroidvania, 16-colour
SNES Puzzle, 16-colour
SNES SHMUP (V), 16-colour
SNES SHMUP (H), 16-colour

Clearly, we would not have all of these assets in one contest, but those would be the ideal packages for an editor. I would also like to see a true Gameboy Zelda assets pack, and a true Z3 assets pack, and I have been slowly working on both of these on whatever free time I can allot to them.

4. Weed out entries with a panel of judges, assembled by the developer staff and community site staff, to make final determinations, if any.

5A. Present completed packages that contain generic assets in the editor, using a prefs dialogue in the ZQues editor under 'New Quest', replacing the generic rulessets that we use now.
5B. Feature assets packages that cannot be distributed openly, such as the aforementioned Gameboy assets pack, as 'add-ons ' that you can install into the editor, by loading them, which appends them tot he new quest dialogue menu.

I would expect the administrative overhead of this to require three to five people who can evaluate the assets, and either three or five panel judges. It would clearly be a much larger undertaking, and if I did it alone, I would need an undertaker shortly thereafter.

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Back on Topic

@Evan20k, @Russ , and @NewJourneysFire should probably all be on your list of potential contestants (that you would recognise and approve), given their past questmaking experience. I fully anticipate this being a Moosh show though, as his revised classic tileset style fits with the general feel of a 'sixth; quest, without being NES bland, and he seemingly has the time and material to pour into this at will.

I would love to see an entry from @Shoelace , and I should pester him to work on something for it.