Warning, you have negative 926 weeks to submit your entry or make sure that your entry is the best it can be. HURRY!
Since ye olde days of Webfoot DROD, one of the things which have changed the least has been the interface. Ok, sure, they added a clock in Journey to the Rooted Hold, but other than that and a few face lifts, there have been no significant changes to the DROD UI. Well, lets have a crack at changing that, shall we?
And before everyone gets scared way, I must emphasis that
this is not an art contest, it's a design contest.
Instructions
Design a new DROD User Interface (the screen that you see as you play the game) in a
800 pixels across and 600 pixels high area. Inside this rectangle, there should be a rectangle scaled somewhere between
655 by 550 to
509 by 430 fitting somewhere inside the 800 by 600 area. This will be the playing area, and rest assured that players won’t like you tampering with this area. Other than that you may squish, squash, stretch, bend or malformed, entirely at your whim.
If you find that set of instructions hard to understand, check the attached image. The black area shows where you can resize the playing area. Note that you can move the playing area anywhere the image.
Requirements
With this submission, you should include:
1. An appropriate title (so that I don’t have to name you something generic as ‘Contestant X’, and so that the voters get a brief summary of your entry)
2. A legend detailing the different parts of your interface, which should include (but are not restricted to):
Portrait
Clock
Map
Directions on how to reach the menu
Scroll Area
Room Co-ordinates and level name
Playing Area(see above)
3. Supplementary images (for showing heavily detailed parts of your interface, and the like), although this is entirely optional, and probably not necessary.
Creating new parts of the DROD UI
If you wish to add any thing to your interface that isn't in the game already, be sure to document it well, including to its feature request, if there is one. Note that the only input that the player can have with new, additional features is a left-mouse click and perhaps a hotkey. Be sure to keep your new feature within spirit of the game (ie, no nightvision) and no features that would be considered cheating/against the official stance of Caravel, the creators of DROD.
Creating/submitting your entry
If your not sure how to create your entry, you can use many different drawing/painting applications, such as mspaint(windows), the gimp (windows, Mac, Unix) or Photoshop(windows, mac), although seeing as you could submit an entry that is just a bunch of rectangular boxes, I advise not to be too worried about what you use.
Once you have picked a paint or drawing application, whip up your entry and attach it to
your submission post (use a zip file if you have more than 1 image). This is in a submission topic, meaning that only me and you will be able to see your post. You're allowed to edit your submission as many times as you like, within the submission time frame.
When you submit your design, be sure to save all image files as either
.gif or .jpg or .jpeg or .png and to have it licensed as either
Creative Commons or
Public Domain, for legal reasons.
You may submit up to 2 different entries. Be sure to make these have major differences, however, as just switching the places of one or two of the objects will probably just create voter frustration, and we wouldn’t want to upset the unspoken heroes of every contest now would we?
Voting
I will be instructing people to vote on how much they would like to use such an interface(in a word, usability), as opposed to pretty looking designs. If you try and make a nice slayer themed UI with little or no changes to the way the UI actually functions, you’re wasting your time. However, that doesn’t mean that you can submit a pile of scribble and hope other people will figure it out.
Dates
The submissions will be open until the
Local Time:02-25-2007 at 10:00 PM, which means you have
negative 926 weeks to submit your entry.
Prizes
First place shall receive 100 rank points, and 1 item from
the prize pile.
Second place shall receive 50 rank points, and the knowledge that they almost came first.
Third place shall receive 25 rank points, and the satisfaction of coming third.
Anyone who has not tried a contest before gets 10 rank points, no questions asked.
All contestants will receive the thrill of participating in this contest.
Disclaimer
This contest is not affiliated with the production of DROD: The City Beneath. Winning will guarantee nothing other than what is currently offered under prizes.
[Last edited by NiroZ at 02-24-2007 01:47 PM]
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I wrote my text, about it, right in the entry thread, I hope I didn't need to write a text doc instead. Please let me know if I need to so I can fix it, thanks.