You've done a few things besides sitting in front of your computer, right? I imagine sometimes you walk to the living room to watch some TV. And perhaps you sometimes trek to the kitchen to microwave yourself a few burritos. People tell me that you live an action-packed life full of events like this. It would be great if there were more information available about all your fascinating activities.
But who will tell your tale? There are some professional biographers that would surely jump at the chance. But how can you trust a stranger to chronicle the wonders of your experience? There's only one person up to the job--you, of course!
For our July contest, we will ask you to tell one true story from your life using a DROD hold, machinema-style. This won't be a story about Beethro or any part of the Eighth; this will be something that really happened--a Story of You!
Rules
1. To enter, you must post between one and three holds in a reply to this topic before:
Local Time:07-20-2006 at 01:00 AM
2. You are asked to remove any entries in excess of three from this topic. If you have more than three posted, there is no guarantee that I'll pick the ones you wanted to use as entrants. If you post more than one version of a hold, be sure to delete earlier holds from the topic.
3. The story you tell in the hold should be something that really happened to you. Of course, it's unlikely that anyone here will be able to verify your truthfulness, but don't tell us that you took a trip to an island full of magical unicorns. An appeal of this contest is that we might learn a little about people's real lives.
4. You can use all the features of the DROD engine like scripting, image floors, audio clips, and demos. I encourage you to put it to good use!
5. The emphasis should be on storytelling, not puzzle-solving. There's no rule against putting puzzles or gameplay challenges in your hold, but I will be asking voters to rate your hold by just its story.
6. Any images or audio that appear in the hold must be completely your own work. You can't copy and paste from other sources, even if you have permission. This means no DROD graphics from any of the games can be used for the contest. Just draw it yourself. Use of photographs are okay if you took them yourself.
7. Each story should be completable within 30 minutes or less. For interactive holds, it should be possible to view/listen to all the content in the hold within 30 minutes or less without making any special kind of effort.
Winning
After people vote, all the entries will have an average rating. Whoever has the entry with the highest rating will win 1st prize, a hundred rank points and any item of his choosing from the
Prize Pile. The second and third placers will win 50 and 25 rank points, respectively.
Only each person's highest-rated entry will be considered for contest placement. In other words, one person can only win one prize no matter how screamingly wonderful his entries are.
Thoughts and Ideas
The player-controlled Beethro element could be you or someone else in the story. It could also be an invisible observer that doesn't effect the story at all.
You could have the player walk through the story interactively. Should the player be able to affect the story? This gets into grey areas because a rule is that the story must be true. Perhaps an interactive exploration would be possible, but the same events would occur regardless of the player's actions.
Instead of having interactivity, you could record a demo to walk the player through the story. In this case, remember to mark your demo to "
Show from Title Screen"
, so that when you export your hold, the demo will be included.
Some ideas for stories:
* A really bad accident you got into
* A date you went on
* Your first day on a job
* The time you got in a fight with a school bully
* The day you forgot your kid at the grocery store
No doubt there will be some DROD-ities that creep into the depiction, i.e. why is the main character holding a sword? My suggestion is to not draw much attention to them, and ask the viewer to filter them out or use his imagination a bit. Your dog might be represented by a roach, for example.
That's the contest. So who's going to make a story?
-Erik
____________________________
The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
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youtube archive (NSFW)
[Last edited by ErikH2000 at 07-03-2006 03:51 AM]
No said I had to, it's just that I wanted too.
