Damn you, Jason. Stop inspiring me!

I'm a bit disappointed, I admit, that the pictures are so Eurocentric. But my brain is going "Prince Henry the Navigator -> Portuguese exploration of Africa -> Portuguese colonialism in Angola and Mozambique -> Angolan War of Independence/Civil War."

Hope that kind of free association is cool.

Hi, Jason.

Thanks for the competition.

When you say you want a text file sent, do you literally mean a .txt file? And a .doc or pdf will be disallowed?

(Coz that will mean no character sheets with circles or dots unless you can express the idea in text)

(Which I like, but is an interesting hidden restriction)

Joe.

Just a text file! Lordy!

Right, thanks. This'll be interesting. =)

Joe.

Hey, you know what, I changed my mind - asking for plain text when I'm also asking you to incorporate media in the design is a little counter-productive, even if it makes my judging life easier. So I changed the rules - up to four letter/A4 pages of whatever you want, plus up to 5MB of multimedia if you need it for some reason. I think that leaves designers more room to work and the constraints are tight enough. Sorry to flip-flop on you!

Four pages seems about right. By using page count, it leaves open the possibility of visual representation, images, diagrams, and so forth, which I think is appropriate. I bet there are creative ways you could incorporate the media option as well. Thanks for bringing it up in the first place!

Don't wuss out on me, Joe!

Phew.

I don't think I could squeeze the game I had in mind down to the requirements, but there may be other games that pop up. I'll see what I can do.

Joe.

Jason, to be clear:

Can multimedia include picture files or diagrams?


Also: Curse you. CURSE YOU.

Posted By: joepubCan multimedia include picture files or diagrams?

Audio or video, so I guess if you wanted to make a video file of your beautiful mug next to a character sheet, photo, or diagram, that'd be technically OK. But it's weak sauce - I'd hope you'd find a good way to use audio or video to enhance, rather than replace.

I should be able to come up with 4 pages in 10-14 days. Any chance someone has zip'd the soundbites together? My company, in its infinite wisdom, has blanket blocked all mp3s.

If not, no biggie, I will d/l from home tonite.

Thanks,
Blue

Ooooooohhh. I know where Sound C comes from.

... and that right there is my game. Hot damn.

Ryan, 100% awesome on all fronts.

That right there is a pretty good bet.

I'm going with Image B, Sound A, and Concept A.

Inspired in part by Kingdom Hearts, City of Lost Children, the Tales of Winnie the Pooh, the music of Tom Waits, the Chronicles of Narnia, the Doctor Who episode "The Doctor Dances", and the Gear World art of Ursula Vernon - I'm feeling a coming of age story in the works.

The character(s) start in the glen - a place they have played as long as they can remember - a plan where they have games of tag with bandits, share tea with talking animals, and leap from tree branch to tree branch like squirrels.

Then one day they find a new place underneath the Great Oak, the friendly tree in the center of the glen that has provided them shade on sunny days and acorn amunition for their bandit games. They find three rusted keys [Image B] and an old gate. They may not open the gate right away, but eventually they do [Sound A] and find themselves in a city of gates.

The city of gates is dark and apparantly deserted. They must find more keys, open more gates [Concept A], and find thier way in a city that - for them - is just awakening.

I don't know how it will play out, but I hope to model the mechanics on the Hero's Journey in some way. I also want to try to keep the mechanic simple - just d6s or some such.

That's all for now. Thanks for the inspiration!

I need some vocal talent if anyone is interested. I have a script with 30-45 seconds of material for different people, some of whom are females. Can I trade vocal talent?

I just got a request for a rules clarification I'll pass along:

If you are submitting audio or video or whatever, please ping me to make sure I can handle your format (.mp3 is pretty nice for me) in advance.

It is totally OK to zip up multiple files as one unit, just make sure it is easy for the judges to identify, handle, and understand.

Thanks!

My game is going to require visual materials (a board, little pieces to move around the board, etc.) that are not "video." So I guess I'll just be disqualified with an 6-8 page game, since I can't include them as part of the 5M attachment and I really need those 4 pages for rules text. Oh well. I never win these contests anyway and the game is gonna be total hotness.

Oh, I totally plan on submitting it, even if it breaks the rules and can't possibly win. I still need the deadline to help me get it finished :)

24 hours to go! I've already received some amazing entries.

My submission has been sent.

Submission submitted.

4-page quickstart version submitted! Yay for not being disqualified! Yay for sleep!

I've got mine little "multimedia role-playing board game" entry in now (barring internet issues). People who don't have access to Jason's email can check it out on my thread.

I sent my submission, but I'm not holding my breath. Good luck to you all!

I submitted my game... I thought it was according to the rules. Perhaps not...

No, actually I got it ... add Chris P.

So... how's it going? =)

Thanks very much. And will all the entries be put somewhere for download (1km1kt, for example)?

Mine is already on the CanonPuncture.com website. Come for the game, stay for the awesome podcasting...

Or something like that.

That sounds like an awful lot of work. Thanks very much to you and yours, Jason.

OK guys, here are the results. It's a short podcast, and here are the show notes in case you want to cut to the chase:

0:00 Intro
4:11 Sinner Ascendant (Chris P)
5:55 Walking Through Walls (Mark V)
7:12 Don't Take A Nap (Tom G)
8:19 Gravers (Rich S)
9:50 Light (Brendan C)
11:19 Mwaantaangand (Jonathan W)
12:58 Old Man/Little Girl (Bret G)
13:57 Kalma (Joe Murphy)
15:53 Key of Absence (James C)
17:34 September Morn (David W)
18:42 Only the Guilty Run (Ryan M)
20:28 Closing Thoughts
22:36 Winner Announcement

Big thanks to everybody who wrote a game! I really enjoyed reading your entries and hope you'll all move forward with your ideas. If you want to talk about your games more, maybe start a thread here at S-G and link to your game, so that people can see what you are up to.

I'd also be interested in knowing what you think of the results format - is audio a good way to give feedback and announce results?

Many congratulations to the winner. I'd love to see the participants post the games for everyone to see. I am very eager to see what people wrote!

Congrats to the winner!

I posted it elsewhere, but you can find my entry on the RPGBakery here.

I thought I'd pop on to the thread (I'm the other audio judge). Congrats to all the entrants, and to the winners! It was fun reading all your games, and I hope everyone continues to develop their ideas. Whisper me if you want my e-mail for further discussion/feedback.

Hey Ryan, it was sort of painful to judge knowing people were probably angling for different things than what we knew and expected. I guess that's a contest for you - no doubt we misunderstood, misapplied, and mistook with every entry.

I'm really interested to see where you go with your game now that the artificial limits have been removed.

Posted By: Ryan MacklinMy next game will involve the dreams of babies as a resolution mechanic.

I'd play that.

I've sent the PDF I submitted to a friend to get it hosted. He's failed to get back to me and I'm at work and can't put anything up for a while.

If someone can host this file for me (at least temporarily until I can put it somewhere) I'd be grateful. Whisper me your email addy and I'll send you the file (which is less than 150 K)

EDIT: never mind, it turns out that google really is the answer to everything! For the time being, the game is here:

Gravers

Big thanks to Jason for organizing. Big thanks to Remi and the other judges. Big props to everyone who competed. Can we start a list of links to all the games that got completed in this thing, for archival, study, and playtest purposes? My game is here.

Also, I was chatting a bit with Remi over email and he confirmed: "...for whatever reason I assumed this was a mod on top of Cold City, not a standalone game. I believe Jason was under the same impression." So I wanted to go on the record and say: Mwaantaangaand is meant to be fully playable without Cold City, with just the rules as I've written them. You don't roll dice for fighting monsters. You and the players negotiate what happens in a given scene or flurry of combat maneuvers based on how far your pawn is from the central Hearthfire space (closer to the fire means the other players get more narrative influence, farther away means it's just you and the GM). You bring in traits solely to skip spaces on the yowa diagram. It's a freeform game with some strong structural elements and some limited resource management (dealing with the potency rank/points of individual monsters).

Now it may be that this means that the game is hollow and missing many vital components, which may mean that my second place finish is not really fully earned, but it certainly means that the game is far weirder and less traditional than people may have previously thought (more like one of Ryan's "experimental whackjob games"). But, yeah, in any case, that's what I was intending.

September Morn can be found here