One thing about videogames that people often complain is that they’re a waste of time. Sure, you have fun. Sure you can socialise over it. But do you learn? Sure, you can argue that videogames can teach all sorts of things, and there’s thousands of educational games out there to prove that. However, DROD is not one of them, unless in life everybody just stands around waiting for you to interact with them, or always waits for your move before moving. Or swords can harmlessly pass through walls and giant snakes. Well, how about fixing this?*
Rules
For this contest, you will be making a DROD RPG hold depicting a historical event and/or cultural myth. I won’t set limits for number of rooms, levels or monsters. However, try to make it take less than 30 minutes to complete, including retries (although I don’t expect people to vote on this unless you go for hours and hours and hours). I would set this in the eighth, but I don’t want to have the contestants have to make up the stories as well. This should be as accurate as possible.
In addition, the contestants will write up a short explanation of the history/myth, providing evidence to back up their tale, explaining anything they feel they left lose in their level set, anything that wasn’t quite factually accurate (due to limitations of DROD RPG, please don’t do a Dan Brown) plus any trivia or background you would feel is relevant. I’m not going to set a word limit, but please keep it brief (and I do expect people to vote on that). People don’t want to have to read an essay on the topic after playing though the hold.
You may make up to three entries, and please state whether you would permit your entry in a compilation or not.
To submit your entry, go
here and attach it. Place the explanation text, if you can, in the ending text. However, considering that it can only hold 1350 characters, which equates to around 160 words, if it doesn't fit, place the text that people are to read after playing the level set in
blue in your message, and I'll post it next to your entry in secret tags.
No custom media. No imported music, images or videos or sound or anything else under the name of media I might have forgot. You may import scripts, however. Not that I'd be able to pick up on that anyway. You may modify the graphics of DROD RPG as much as you want, within the actual engine. There is a _Mycolor (Yes, I know. The misspelling is killing me inside) variable under the
set var action in the scripting menu. This variable changes the colour of characters. The default setting (what you see on the screen normally) is 50,50,50. That is 50/99 Red, 50/99 Green, 50/99 Blue, in that order. Thus, a 00,00,01 will make a character completely black, 99,99,99 would make a character fairly whiter. Higher values increases the colour, lower values decrease the colour. Note that this is not removing or placing colour, it is simply changing the strength of each colour within the character where it already had it. So the black outlines of the characters stay the same not matter what.
You can use this, on conjunction with the hp, gold, def, atk, rep to create your own custom monsters, which you can use
this spreadsheet to work out precisely how the monster will behave in terms of damage, and how much atk/def is needed to kill without harming the player, and how little atk is needed to attack and excreta. There is also a range of music within DROD RPG, as well as the ability to use a combination of monsters/characters, objects, floors and walls to create pictures either in the room, or in the minimap. Don't believe me? Checkout
Seasons or
Castle Steele by Elfstone if you want to see examples. Sure, the smaller room size does make things more restricted, but nowhere near impossible.
If you want to know why I'm banning custom images, see
this post.
TimingLocal Time:10-03-2009 at 01:00 PM ,
negative 794 weeks to finish your entires.
Voting
The voting for this contest will be two fold, although the criteria will be much the same. The voter will vote on the telling of the history/myth. Accuracy will be paramount, entrants should be strongly penalised for making factual errors without a good reason. How entertaining the historical/mythical element of the level set is what you should vote on. Even if a voter has just happened to have studied that particular thing for their PHD, even though you cannot surprise them with twists, weird facts or any other tricks, your interpretation of the tale should be intriguing enough to make it entertaining, in much the same way that people who read the book watch the movie.
As for the game play/design, that too should be judged by how entertaining it is, and also how seamlessly the history/myth integrates into it. Does it go gameplay gameplay gameplay CUTSCENE gameplay gameplay gameplay, or is it a smooth tasty blend like they advertise on TV?
Prizes
100 rank points (not to be confused with mod points) and a pick from the prize pile for winning
50 rank points for coming second
25 for coming third.
Tips
Pick something that is A)interesting B)Easy to fit into a 30 minute level set. I want voters to feel that the history/myth was built into the level set from the ground up, not have a level set built, and then thrown a few bits of trivia in.
Don’t pick something that is common knowledge, such as WWII or the Christian bible mythology (that is, mythology from the perspective of history). Well, maybe if you picked a really specific bit of WWII that didn’t involve the holocaust or D Day or the invasion of France you could get away with it, but that's beside the point. And if you do something that is familiar to the public consciousness, make sure you find obscure facts or shatter some myths. Or you can hope that your storytelling skills a strong enough that it's irrelevant.
Definitely research your topic, even if it’s just a trip to Wikipedia. Doing it in highschool really doesn’t cut it, as there’s always new discoveries, and they really do simplify things and omit the less than G rated facts. On that topic, remember that there are children on the forum, so something lewd, like what a lot of the greek gods got up to, no matter how factually accurate and entertaining, is not a good idea.
Don’t pick a brief or vague topic. Sure, they make it easy to make level set out of, but I want the player to be provoked into though about the topic. And you'll also get poor marks on the story side because vague tales aren't very engaging, and brief tales won't have enough content to make the story immersed in the level set. Kinda like spreading smooth peanut butter. The number of topics to chose from is nearly infinite, so you've got no excuse. Ideally you should find something that has an enormous amount of detail, and then you cut out what you don’t need. The more tightly ingrained into the level set the better. If you need help with that, I recommend you read
this and
this. And if you want more advice, you try
this. (Man, I've been wanting to post that for ages.)
It doesn’t have to be a story told by history or mythology, in fact, there doesn't even have to be a story at all (although you should have some kind of narrative). In fact, it doesn’t even have to have people in it, even if you are telling history, or even animals. Or if you are telling a story, who says you have to stick to one? (provided, of course, it's on the same subject. Cramming multiple bits of history/mythology into one level set will each count as an entry. Please don't do that.)
If you have a problem, feel one of my rules restricts your schedule or your brilliance, please, bring it up now, before the entries close. Remember, the further we are into the contest, the less likely I’m going to be willing the change things.
Oh, and make sure you play through the entire level set one last time after you’ve changed and your ready to submit. There’s nothing more crushing that finding out that your hard work is for naught because you accidentally made the level set impossible.
*I know, it could be improving your intellectual capacity and problem solving skills. But that kills my argument, so shush.
[Last edited by NiroZ at 09-26-2009 06:22 AM]
