Suggestions for competitions and activities

[Sane Co.]

 Voice Acting Competition
This competition lasts a week and includes a fixed host, who comes up with lines and a set guideline for a voice actor to perform. An example would be: "Fetch me eggs, wine, beer and a magazine for the market. If you don't, I will cuddle you until you die!"(note that there would be longer lines) said by an an evil villian with a lisp. The voice actor would then record these lines and post them on the forum with a working link. The winner is determined by majority vote. Voting commences the day after the deadline. The first second and third places recieve tophies (and bragging rights).
The competition is for educational and entertaining purposes. People practice working as a voice actor, and have fun in the process.
I hope you will consider this competition for your competition forums,
Sane Co.

[Baron]

Although I'm a little slow with seconding it, I think Sane Co.'s Voice Acting Competition sounds like a great idea.  You could have fun, hone your skills, and not invest a tonne of time: the perfect contest!  I don't think the lines need to be terribly lengthy: short and sweet work for me.  Even just themes would work: two guys exchange insults -go!  A kid loses his candy -go!  Scolding wife is angry about trivial thing -go!

[Eric]

I only recently discovered the Hall of Fame thread and noticed there used to be a voice acting comp up until 2006.

I've been trying to think of a tactful way to suggest bringing it back (apparently I completely ignore stickied threads like this one and the HoF thread). I'd like to give voiceover work a try, have a mic and a copy of Audition, and a range of voices I'm capable of performing. However, I don't want to volunteer for game work because I'm completely inexperienced and I could be a total wash-up.

A voice acting comp would give me, and perhaps others, a nice way of trying out.

[Jared]

Scrapheap Challenge  -  more an annual sort of thing, I guess but the idea to make a game where all the backgrounds or characters (depending on what you have the most of) that you've drawn but never used are the assets you use to make a game. It's similar to the complete your game challenge, but it's come up because I've noticed that my Pictures folder is crammed with pixel art characters which, of course, I've never used because I STILL have managed to not make a game yet.

Alternately if we could host a page where a heap of people upload unused sprites, backgrounds (pieces of music, I suppose, AGS is all inclusive ) and then the challenge is for people to make a game using only those resources...

Eh, as I'm typing this I'm going off the idea, actually, as it's similar to a lot of AGS stuff that's out there. But it would probably be fun anyway.

[Sane Co.]

I agree with Barron. We should make it less specific, or we could do both.
And Eric I totally agree with you. That's why I posted the idea.

[Eric]

I say check in with the mods then, point to the precedent of the previous voice acting competition, and get this thing restarted -- it was your idea, after all!

[Gilbert]

Yeah. As the original activity was pretty dead by now, I think it doesn't hurt trying to start anew and I think the rules are okay.

So go ahead, start a new round and we'll see whether this will last.

[Deu2000]

* Title of activity: Resource Swarm
* Description: The participants must participate with two characters, a background and a story. The purpose is educational and entretaining
* Periodicity: Participate time: 1 week. Voting time: another week
* Type of competition: The winner is elected by votation of favourite bg, character and story.
* Thread administrator: The winner will be the administrator of the next round

[selmiak]

I have an idea but don't know how to manage it
The idea is make a huge image where everyone participating paints one piece. One of these huuuuuuge scrollable pixelart images.
I have an idea for a theme that would be diving platform. Imagine some ladders tied together reaching up high into the sky or even space with a dark blue background on top and going down to brighter blue. There are people climbing up, some are diving down and there are cupboards tied in inbetween and so on. The whole thing stands on a mountain where stairs and more ladders lead up, and will extend down into the water where people are landing and diving and eaten by sharks and some skeletons on the bottom of the pond. It could even extend deeper to some caves where people are having waterfun and some skeletons are buried inbetween the rocks.

a huge but still limited palette is useful here.

So one method would be to sketch it all out and have artistic people sign up for parts and see what happens.

or method 2: have no sketch and have artists sign up for pieces but one at a time and you have to extend where the former part ends. this seems more constant but also slow in progress.


Sounds interesting? So how would you manage this? And what to do if an entry is really really bad and doesn't fit to the quality of the other parts?

[Eric]

I think the exquisite corpse method is the way to go. Could be interesting!

[LTGiants2000]

I like the voice acting one that Sane Co. suggested and started. I already submitted my entry....no, I'm not campaigning for votes!!! 

[selmiak]

exqusite corpse sounds indeed exquisite. But that would be rather chaotic and I like chaos. And you wouldn't have to manage all that much.
You only need a fixed width and a ~maximum height, once you're done you post the last 2-3 lines of pixels and the next one can paint on from there. Once the next painter posted his 2-3 lines of his finished picture you can post your whole image. And the first post is constantly updated with the additions. Interesting surreal results guaranteed

cons:
-slow progress, only one person at a time. Can be avoided by going up and down from the startimage. This need some more managing though
- if this person fails to deliver someone else has to claim his addition and this takes even more time so people might lose interest. If the results are really mindblowing though...
- why hide the image? maybe some more continuity is also great. But this is against the corpse excuisite idea

soooo, how does 200x200 for every patch sound?
style: pixel art
palette... dunno, I like my freedom, the 8 bit era is long gone and 65536 colors are more than enough (16bit)
one rule: make sure to have some unfinished shape/form/stuff going to the border and not only the end of a background gradient.


I also have an inspiration for a starting image, so if I manage to complete it by tomorrow expect a new thread and some pixels to continue from

[LTGiants2000]

In my attempts to "fall in line" with the rules around here, I am reposting what I proposed as a separate thread earlier.

I was wondering if any of the awesome developers here at AGS have ever thought about holding a contest and then as an Award, the winner gets a cameo in-game! It could be in the form of a shout out, a poster in the background or maybe even a hand drawn (or pixelated) version of them in the game? Sorry I don't have any games in development right now or I would offer it myself, but I think that would be a really cool and fun way to get people excited about: A) Your game being released and B) Posting more often in the forums! I for one would love to be remembered in digital form in one of your fine pieces of interactive art.

[Crimson Wizard]

Have anyone ever mentioned such idea as using the winner of previous competition of different type as a reference? By winner I do not mean AGSer but the piece (art, music etc) that won the award.

Consider: someone makes a great background in the "Background" competition, and for the next "Music" competition participants should write music for that background. Or "Writing" competitors should write a story that takes place or somehow connected to the location on the background.
I a while a piece of music or writing could be taken as a reference for making background pic.
Same for sprites, animations etc.

Found similar suggestions:
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=27157.msg583545#msg583545
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=27157.msg554968#msg554968

[Gilbert]

I couldn't remember well, but I think such thing has been done before.
After all, it's all up to the host of an activity on how the rules in the round are set up.

[Sane Co.]

I agree with crimson wizard and every so often a game should be made in this manner, one room of course. but there would first be background, then writing, then music then voice acting, and finnally we could have a coding comp. I bet it would make a cool game.

[selmiak]

if there was a coding comp with already done assets it would make more than only one cool game. But then writing should be interpreted freely

[Deu2000]

I have another idea.

AGS OLYMPICS

All the actual competitions in one!

[Vince Twelve]

I'd like to host another Chain Story if there would be enough interest.  It's been about 2 years since the last one!  They always turn out pretty funny!

Some of the past chain stories:
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=41299.0
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=33723.0
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=41001.0
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=38663.0

[Armageddon]

Can we bring back the *Photoshop Biweekly: Using your favourite editing program, modify a picture to fit the theme of the week.?