Clock Tower Carnival Contest! Discussion Thread

[Jiffy]

A lot of you may know about the lack of contest entries for the Clock Tower Carnival. I want to turn this into a discussion about what went wrong, if anything, and what people would like to see in the future.
A few questions that some people could give their opinion on:

• Why did you choose not to enter the contest?
• Did you foresee any issues with an entry, if you were planning to create one?
• If you did attempt an entry for the contest, how were you not able to get your entry in on time? What rules could we put in place to ensure your entry is manageable?
• If you did attempt an entry for the contest, which conditions were the hardest to meet?

Any further feedback is appreciated, and discussion with others can be put in this thread.

[Moehr]

Our team had an entry, we had some issues with using an irregular ROM template to start with, which ended up making our chief level editor and team leader being unable to use smile for several periods.

I can't speak for the other teams but sometimes entrants will be trying something unusual for fun, and sometimes that means the effort will end in failure.

In our case it is at least possible that another few months would have been necessary to get it done with all of the added complications.

We don't mind that we couldn't pull it off in time, these things happen. As long as contests have time limits, it will always be possible to hold a contest that sees no entries.

I guess if desired, it could be required members who want to compete sign up, and the committee allow unplayable submissions to be entered just for the sake of seeing what actually had been accomplished. Then, instead of no submissions, you'd have broken stuff to look at.

I entered a broken entry for the sake of competition when submitting the contest version of temple of the  winds, and many people were frustrated by the many severe issues it had.

I didn't have time to do gfx for no safe harbor or remove a major bug or two and some players had a hard time with it as a result.

Even if broken entries are permitted, so long as there are times limits, it is possible to have no entries.

I guess if there were a sign up you could at least have a feel for the level of interest.

For what it's worth I loved the theme for this one and wish I could have succeeded in getting ED's version of smile running cause man, he had a lot of.crazy ideas :D

If nothing else I learned a ton about hud editing and made some neat patches, so I still feel like it w

[Sapphron]

I feel like (and some others have voiced support for this)a longer time period would help for some contests, and for a person who wants to get into hacking, 2 months doesn't seem like enough (at least for me). Maybe a 3 or 4 month period to help with this?

[MetroidMst]

The bigger issue with longer periods is people thinking they have time, and from my own experiences that is not true. Shorter periods are to prevent too ambitious of a project thst simply won't be completed in a few months. It does have merit, and makes sense that more time gives people more sbility to join. Just from experience though, that doesn't happen. (We even gave this contest an extra 10 days.)

[liamnajor]

I don't know about everyone else, but I was just working a lot and getting ready to rent a place of my own. I couldn't find the time, unless I was willing to shit one out like last time, which I wasn't.

[Hackmi]

damn this contest got a lot of entries.
ok but srsly, i did not enter because the clock tower stuff was way too specific, 2 months is long enough for me but yeah i was also busy with other projects and moving onto new work.
"1: Hack must be based on some sort of clock, preferably a clock tower.
2: The map should be in the shape of a clock or clock tower. (You will have to defend your map shape)"
This was so, so limiting even for my inital idea which wasn't going to be very serious admittedly, but really shaping the map as a clock tower is just, so restricting.

idk tbh, maybe make ppl vote on a new contest? maybe remake M2 in SM style up to a certain point or something ???
or be really specific but make sure its something people are actually interested in. the clock tower thing honestly if it were just to make puzzles around time or something maybe it could've worked, time limited bosses stuff like that

[kkzero]

Liam reached out to me and PJ for research into making a timer asm for Metroid II or even custom music. I did reach the point of making a custom test song, but as for the asm I only got to the point of modifying the HUD to accommodate timer digits within its tilemap layout.

In the latter half of the contest time, motivation to actually work toward stuff for an entry was nullified by my time spent researching for and coding this.

[FelixWright]

Alright here's my 2 cents.

I did not enter the contest because other things were eating up my free time. (looking at you, Risk of Rain 2!)

Similar to hackmi's statement I felt that for a contest theme, this one was too specific. Like once you've seen one of them, you've pretty much seen them all. (obviously this isn't true but when everyone's overall map layout is supposed to be about the same, motivation dwindles)

I agree with Sapphron in that the contest submission form should have more options for the duration of the contest, things like 4 and 6 months. While yes this does mean that there aren't nearly as many contests in a given year, it also means that contest participants aren't bogged down with back-to-back contests 4 or so times a year. It gives contestants and committees the option to strive for a quick-n-dirty hack challenge or something more ambitious while still within some form of time constraint. They could use some of that time to even take a short break!

As for what MST said I'm not 100% on board. I agree that ppl procrastinate (I do so myself a lot more often than I should) but in that case these contests should also be meant to practice in time management. Budgeting all the things you plan to cover in a hack, with hard cutoffs after so long. This would be handy to prevent feature creeping your submission to death.

IMO this just wasn't really a theme that contestants were 100% on board with. I believe that in the future similar to ROTM we should host polls where the community provides input on what contest should be next instead of just the committee. While it does take away from the power of contest committees I believe this would give more people a reason to make or participate in contests compared to how it is now where it almost feels like a circlejerk between original contest winners choosing each other's contest ideas.

[VacantShadeGames]

I'm not really part of the "hacking" community, so it may not be worth much, but here's a thought.

It sounded pretty cool that there was 1 project a bunch of people were collaborating on. Creating a hack requires a ton of different skills, like level design, graphics, music, asm, and a bunch of stuff I'm probably unaware of. It's hard for 1 person to have all these skills, and even harder for 1 person to balance their time between them to make something good.

Contests can be a great motivational way to learn/create, but I think having a "Community Project" that is set for a limited time could be just as instructional, and perhaps lend itself to creating some pretty awesome hacks.

Perhaps you could alternate between contests and community projects, each running for 4-6 months or however long.

I imagine Community Projects could be organized with a theme/objective in mind for the hack, but also with different members focusing on specific areas, like level design, asm, graphics, music, ect. Ideally someone with experience would lead each area, but those with less experience looking to learn more could join that specific field to "work under" the leader and learn the ropes.

That could also be pretty beneficial as that is how a real game studio works, or any organization really, so it would teach important life skills.  :wink:

[Metroid3D]

Other people have already talked about how the theme was too specific so I'm gonna ignore that. I think a big part was also the timing(hehe) of the contest. It started at the beginning of June and ran until the first week of August. Issue being a lot of people have finals around that time so anyone in school wouldn't have much time to make a hack. Nobody's mentioned this yet but the rule:

On games with multiple submaps, hack must be built entirely on one submap.

Is really pointlessly limiting. I don't understand why this is a rule?

The scoring system was also confusing. Score is VERY IMPORTANT and something that should be VERY CLEAR. Bringing the theme into that was kinda neat but felt kinda unclear onto how it would work.

In summary, too specific/unnecessary limits, poor timing, score system hurt my brain.

I do think VacantShade's idea for a community collab could be really cool and would love to see something like that. Maybe split it into two teams so there's some competition?

[Mentlegen]

Lmao this theme was awful

[liamnajor]

I second the democratic contest system. Hopefully, if we go with that, we can have another contest up soon (because we basically got a 2 month break).

[Quietus]

The only thing that sprang to mind for me was the theme being very specific, and the fact that others have voiced the same point a few times before me makes it seem like the concensus, I guess. :neutral:

[Boomerang]

For what it's worth, I actually liked the theme of the contest and thought people were being overly-dramatic about it. Limitation is often the breeder of creativity, after all, and I did have stuff planned for the contest.

However, in my case specifically, I was wrapping up my final year of university (summer courses) and wanted to focus on that before I did any meaningful work on it. By the time I was finished with school, I had only a scant week to do anything. I did, however, make a mock-up map if anyone was interested:

[spoiler][/spoiler]

[mccad]

IMO a good contest consists of a theme thats largely up to interpretation and a gimmick which influences design. This theme was a little too restrictive in the sense that the theme was largely set in stone and the gimmick was a little too extreme, thats just my take
As for contest length, i think 3 months would be a decent timeframe

[OneOf99]

I'll put my thoughts here because although I'll be discussing this with other contest committee members I really like the discussion going on here.

My main gripe with the contest was, like mccad said, the overly restrictive rule-set. My team of elite game hackers really struggled with coming up with a good way of making a hack on just one subscreen. We had initially considered making the clock-tower span two areas due to a present<->past time travel mechanic but that was made impossible due to the arbitrary rule on rooms (even though that does kind of remind me of a recent contest with arbitrary room limits hmmmm).

The second main issue was just our lack of time and creativity. Some people here have brought up a good point in that the timeframe (both length and timing) for the contest was subpar. I wouldn't really hold that against anyone but it definitely is something to think about a lot. I've generally tried to participate in every contest possible ever since I have joined metconst but at some point enough is enough and you can't go making hacks all the time. We were just creatively drained and that's not something that can be blamed on the contest. Boomerang's map looks really cool and is kind of what we were trying to go for too (clock-tower with sub-areas all on one screen) but making hacks takes effort.

There are many ways in which we can make future contests flow better and work out, so I'll just list off my ideas (that I definitely didn't steal from other posts in this thread):
-Longer contest period
-Less contests per year
-Less rules that restrict game design
-More rules that encourage game design (ok hear me out, when we did stuff like the "cleaning" contest, one of the rules I thought was good there was that there was some forced non-linearity in the overall hack design. This gave the hackers a good direction to start to go towards instead of just saying "you are restricted to X amount of rooms")
-More public discussion on hacks we want to host and what kinds of themes we want to see and how we want those themes to affect the gameplay.

Honestly to this point I think the best theme we have had was the Fall Contest because it literally just gave a broad scope of "yeah do something with fall/autumn/halloween/thanksgiving" and people were able to do what they wanted under that large umbrella. It's not easy to create contests and it's just as hard to create hacks. Anyways sorry for rambling like that I'm sure I repeated myself at least ten times with something there lol.

[dewhi100]

Disclaimer: I have never entered a contest, and have only played a few contest hacks in total.

The current contest schedule is great. Perfect time constraint while still leaving enough time for those who can focus and use that time effectively. And of course we get a new contest every three months which keeps it fresh. I can see how creators could easily get "burned out" though. It wouldn't be so bad to have a short, medium, and long contest every year if that would help. I also liked the idea of a "community project".

I agree with those who feel that "clock-face-shaped or clock-tower-shaped" is too limiting. A single submap is too limiting as well, as at least in SM you will need some hex tweaks or ASM to have more than a miniboss, boss, and torizo.

No existing tilesets that I know of are very clock-themed in their look, and most hacks do not extensively create new tilesets just for a contest. That can be discouraging.

This has definitely inspired me to design a majora's mask styled campaign in the future. losing your ammo/energy tanks, resealing door caps, and warping to bosses you killed before for a rematch sounds dope. It would be too ambitious for this contest's time frame, sadly. At least for me.

Another idea inspired by this contest was Samus shrinking down and battling microbes as she races to disarm a bomb based on an *atomic* clock. That would be sweet. Sadly it is not clock face or clock tower themed.

Personally, I did not enter the contest because I am focusing on completing my own hack (this goes for all contests so far). I *was* looking forward to what the community would deliver under such specific constraints.

I'm glad and grateful for all the constructive criticism coming into the thread, and to the committee for offering the chance to give input.