Dart Zaidyer wrote:Hang on, when this contest started the deadline was November 5th.I'm running a collaborative thread on Talking Time to finish a quest we hope to enter into this contest. November 5th was the agreed-upon deadline and bumping it forward without warning simply leaves us with not enough time.
We have to assemble all nine dungeons and an overworld, and do thorough testing to make sure the difficulty is even, there are no bugs or exploits, and everything follows the rules laid out and keeps to the spirit of a NES Quest.
In my opinion, the shortened deadline is completely biased in favor of lone authors who are so entrenched in this engine that they can bang out a finished quest, yet spend almost no time on QA. I assume that happens after the deadline passes, but it necessarily takes a group of people longer to build and test for consistency. (We have about three guys so far.) And a good QA process is very important because last time we had this contest, we wound up with the Fourth Quest, which has this situation in it.
That one Black Moldorm never stays dead and is revisited by the same player several times more during that video series. But that's not all, elsewhere in the dungeon he gets trapped in a situation where he's missing a key and can't escape without resorting to the Continue screen.
The agreed upon deadline was about 6 weeks from the start of the contest. Gleeok mistakenly put the wrong date. However that isn't a hard deadline. A hard deadline hasnt been set just yet.
Okay. We'll do what we can in the given timeframe, but it's gonna be pretty close I think. I'd just hate to miss it.
[MENTION=38664]Dart Zaidyer[/MENTION]: I screwed up the date, but maybe it's not such a bad thing. There's no "for-no-reason-because-we-said-so Nazi deadline" or anything like that. We're going for more of a community thing than the 4th - which was out of nowhere, and had a very short time frame - to try and produce some quality quests. The last thing we want is for content to suffer or people having to drop out because of time constraints, which from what I've seen seems to be a real issue. More time has been requested by a few people already also.
How about this: Submissions deadline will be from Oct. 5th up to Nov. 5th, or until entrants are done, whichever comes first. How does that sound?
Gleeok wrote:How about this: Submissions deadline will be from Oct. 5th up to Nov. 5th, or until entrants are done, whichever comes first. How does that sound?
Make it 'or until declared entrants are done' and that'll be perfect. If people want to submit past October 5th, they have to first admit that they're competing. Thing of it as mandatory forum activity.
The only problem with that is "what happens when one of the declared entrants decides to be lazy and hold up the contest for 6 months?" I like the idea of just adding an extra month... THen again, I've been busy enough with MY quest that I haven't even started on my 5th quest entry, yet.
lineas wrote:The only problem with that is "what happens when one of the declared entrants decides to be lazy and hold up the contest for 6 months?" I like the idea of just adding an extra month... THen again, I've been busy enough with MY quest that I haven't even started on my 5th quest entry, yet.
Hence the "whichever comes first" part. 😉
Yeah, that`s what I meant. Suppose that all declared entrants have finished their entry by October 17th and we close the contest, but then somebody comes along and says `But I haven`t finished yet!`. If they had told us they intended to compete, then we would have waited. But they`re dropping in out of the blue and stopping the contest for want of thirty seconds to post ``I am going to compete.``
In other other words, anyone intending to enter has to tell us by Oct 4th. After that we will expect all declared participants to supply a quest or a resignation for the contest by or before Nov 5th.
Sorry about bad format, on a mobile device.
Let this just be my declaration, then, that I intend to enter the contest.
Oh... yeah... no I just misread it, you wrote it fine.
My computer died today. I wasn't very far along but I did get a lot of work done on it last night and was looking forward to getting beck into it. Hopefully I'll be back the the game with enough time to squeeze in something.
Going to let us test it Chris?
Heads up: Life circumstances have been unkind to me and my crew recently, so it's very unlikely we'll be finished by October 5th. I'll do my best to sort things out and get some more progress going. Sorry to drag things out like this; here's hoping we'll be ready before November 5th.
Dart Zaidyer wrote:Heads up: Life circumstances have been unkind to me and my crew recently, so it's very unlikely we'll be finished by October 5th. I'll do my best to sort things out and get some more progress going. Sorry to drag things out like this; here's hoping we'll be ready before November 5th.
That's okay, that's why we set up the floating deadline: so people wouldn't have to panic if something came up. We'll wait until November if it's needed; that is not a problem.