kieranmillar
Level: Smitemaster
Rank Points: 3027
Registered: 07-11-2014
IP: Logged

Hey look, it's that time of year again!

This year has seen an explosion in the number of holds, almost twice as many as last year! We have 30! 7 of them are RPG holds, which is by far the largest bumper bonanza year for RPG ever. (There were only 16 published RPG holds by the end of 2015, to put it into perspective, almost a 50% increase in published RPG holds in just one year!) Here they are:

* Annie's Half-Finished Hold by Lucky Luc
* Avos' Dungeon by GerAvos
* Beethro Budkin's Big Burrito Butt Blast by kieranmillar
* Blind Race #1: On Your Marks by Lucky Luc (Collaboration)
* Blind Race #2: Ready, Set, Go! by blorx1 (Collaboration)
* Blind Race #3: A Three-for-All by Nuntar (Collaboration)
* Chance for Paradise by Crimson Moon
* DRO by kieranmillar
* DROD Standard Compilation by hyperme (Collaboration)
* Gardeviance by disoriented
* Ghostsmiters by Bent
* Hold by blorx1
* Jmit' 2 by EvgeniyS
* Like Grains In An Hourglass by Jeff_Ray...
* Mini Mimicry by bomber50
* Persistence by Xindaris
* Rodents of unusual size by Red-XIII
* Secluded Sanctum by Doom
* Temporal Adventure by hyperme
* The Spacetime Kerfluffle by Xindaris
* Torus by Insoluble
* WYSISWG by Insoluble (Collaboration)
* Xindaris' First Hold by Xindaris

RPG
* 2016 Year of RPG Compilation by kieranmillar (Collaboration)
* Castle Repton by Nuntar
* Fetch The Pie by Chaco
* One way by Red-XIII
* Rock Candy Mines by Chaco
* RPG Anonymous 3 by hyperme (Collaboration)
* Ten-minutes distraction by Suwako

As this is an awards ceremony for the community, by the community, it's important that the community is all on board with the running of it. Again, I would like to ask if it is OK for me to run it again this year.

As there are so many holds to vote on this year, the question arises on if it is appropriate to have all of them up for vote in most categories, or if we should try to pare down some of the lists in order to make voting less overwhelming.

Here's each of the 15 voting categories from last year:

1) Best Custom Game Element
Chance for Paradise explodes the number of custom game elements up for voting this year, but I figure we may as well still include them all. Does Persistance's scripting to add permanent physical changes to rooms count as a custom game element? Personally I feel like that's more appropriate for the scripting award.

2) Design Excellence in a Modification or Addition
The best non-hold contribution. There's Chaco's room style, but what else? Should DezzTech's second batch of HD wall textures for RPG be up for vote? That won by default last year.

3) Technical Design Excellence in Scripting
To be honest, this award has felt over the last few years of just being a second award for the best custom element to win, making it kind of the same thing as the first award. Makes the custom element award seem slightly redundant?

4) Technical Design Excellence in Layout and Aesthetics
This award usually gets everything up for vote. That's a lot to vote on.

5) Technical Design Excellence in Concept
Again this is another category that usually gets everything listed all at once.

6) Creative Design Excellence in Storyline
And this one, but at least there are some easy ones to remove from this list, like contest compilations and the blind races, and Hold also immediately springs to mind.

7) Creative Design Excellence in Difficulty
Traditionally this category is for holds that have a difficulty rating of 7 or more brains. Here's what fits into that list this year:


8) Creative Design Excellence in Entertainment
And the list for this one:


9) DROD Hold of the Year
I think this one should always definitely have all of the holds up for vote. That's 23 holds but I think that's fine.

10) DROD RPG Level Set of the Year
Nothing much to say here.

11) Best Voice Artist in a Distinct Role
Are Chance for Paradise and J'mit 2 the only voice acted holds?

12) Novice Architect Award
This is typically people with their first non-collaborative release this year. Under that criteria we get:
* Bent (Ghostsmiters)
* Crimson Moon (Chance For Paradise)
* GerAvos (Avos' Dungeon)
* Nuntar (Castle Repton)
* Xindaris (Xindaris's First Hold, Persistence, The Spacetime Kerfluffle)

13) Erik Hermansen Award for Lifetime Architectural Achievement
The criteira for this has always been:
* Release a non-collaborative hold this year
* Not previously won the award
* Have 4 or more non-collaborative releases with an average vote of 7 or more fun.
* First non-collaborative release was 3 years ago (2014).

Using these criteria we get:
* bomber50
* Jeff_Ray... (RPG)
* kieranmillar (RPG)
* Red-XIII (RPG)

14) Best Community Contributor
I think the previous procedure for nominations for this category have worked out fine the last two years and see no reason to change it.

15) Best DROD Let's Player
Last year's new award. It seemed to go well. I guess we should also include Twitch streams too? I might need help compiling the list for these.

---------------

What are people's thoughts?

EDIT: Accidentally forgot about Xindaris on the novice architect list

---

[Last edited by kieranmillar at 01-01-2017 02:50 PM]

kieranmillar
Level: Smitemaster
Rank Points: 3027
Registered: 07-11-2014
IP: Logged

Scripted "Elements"

The first award has historically been an award for the best scripted element. This year there's an awful lot of stuff that applies, but it's brought up an interesting point... what actually qualifies as an element, and should such an arbitrary distinction be applied?

Take Chance for Paradise, a hold with a very large amount of scripted stuff. Some of them can clearly be defined as an element, but some, like Tarstuff Speed Growth, is still used as a central level theme despite not really being an "element" in the traditional sense. Should this sort of thing really be included in the vote? Is there any real non-arbitrary reason why it shouldn't be?

I've compiled a list below (in no particular order) of what I hope are all of the things this year that could be classed as custom elements. I have not played all of these holds so please let me know if I'm missing something. Should they all be included?

Cherry Blossom from 2016 Year of RPG Compilation (Nuntar's Entry)

Torus from Torus
Torus Roach from Torus - In practice do these two need to be classed separately? Or is the roach just a part of the overall torus idea?

Burrito from Beetho Budkin's Big Burrito Butt Blast

Opal from Avos's Dungeon

Droppable bridges from Persistence - Does this count? I mean it's a scripted concept used throughout the hold, even if it's scripted as room-by-room specific rather than a general purpose "element" per se

Ghost Skull from Ghostsmiters

Orb Dispensers from Gardeviance

== Chance for Paradise ==
Regenator X
Regenator O
Cessator
Void Flower
Magnets
Countdown Tiles
Sun Thing
Quicksand
Tarstuff Speed Growth
Heatwaves

== Temporal Adventure ==
Yellow Chronovore
Orange Chronovore
Red Chronovore
Timesplitter
Bubblegun
Block Snake

P.S. I will open up PMs for the community contribution award sometime later this week

---

[Last edited by kieranmillar at 01-10-2017 11:59 PM : Opal from Avos's Dungeon. Thanks Nuntar]

Xindaris
Level: Smitemaster

Rank Points: 1593
Registered: 06-13-2015
IP: Logged

I'll pitch in slightly and say that, as the maker of Persistence, I personally consider the "bridge dropping"/"persistent orb" mechanics to be more of a "thing I scripted in this hold" and less of a "custom element", if only for the fact that the only way for some other architect to make one of their own is essentially scripting the whole thing from scratch for whatever their specific circumstances are. I would personally expect something called a "custom element" to more or less work as a black box for architects other than the original designer, requiring only a little bit of setup beyond what a normal monster or object placement would require. To me, the ability for others to fairly easily use the element is what separates "scripting stuff" from "a custom element".

____________________________
109th Skywatcher

Here are some links to Things!

---

[Last edited by Xindaris at 01-11-2017 12:14 AM]

Insoluble
Level: Smitemaster

Rank Points: 1639
Registered: 09-04-2014
IP: Logged

Going along with what Xindaris sais, I'm not really sure that "Torus" counts as a custom element so much as it's basically 5 or so cobbled together scripts run (somewhat badly) by various NPC characters more than a single element.* "Torus Roach" I guess is more along the lines of a custom element.

Also, I feel like we should include the scripted thingy in the last level of The Spacetime Kerfluffle though I would defer to Xindaris on that. Lastly, Ghostsmiters technically has two completely different kinds of scripted ghosts. The main ones and the ones that only show up in challenge mode.

*(Secretly Doris the Torus is the best scripted element ever and ya'll know it!)

____________________________
Links to neat forum tools that I always have trouble finding:

Dischorran
Level: Smitemaster

Rank Points: 3414
Registered: 09-10-2005
IP: Logged

Plenty of things that are "obviously" custom elements have multiple scripts, though. Conways needed several (or at least used several), and many including ones in TSS need a helper or two to monitor things. I'm not sure I'd consider a monster and its corresponding generating token, say, to be separate either.

Not that the contest categories are a matter of life or death, of course.

____________________________

Xindaris
Level: Smitemaster

Rank Points: 1593
Registered: 06-13-2015
IP: Logged

Well, needing more than one script or a minor "helper" character is the "little bit of setup beyond" I'm talking about. Flowers, for example, need an extra thing to let them know whether they should be brained or not; that's an acceptable amount of extra stuff for other architects to do but the actual main functions of the flower itself are still basically a black box. I've made a whole level themed on flowers while hardly looking at their code at all, for example, and I consider the ability to do something like that (even just in theory) to be what separates a custom element from "just some scripting".

I would suspect torus roaches of being a generally applicable custom element IF they could in theory, without too much modification, be pasted into some other hold where Beethro isn't in a torus but the roaches themselves can still "teleport" over room borders in the same sort of way. But it's something I don't know since I haven't had a look at their code nor attempted to do such pasting.

I'm fine with temporal echoes being called a custom element; they need a special thing to tell them how to start but most of their code is indeed a black box. I'd be inclined to call them temporal echoes V1 or .01 alpha or something like that though since they honestly have rather limited use compared to what I honestly want them to "be" one day if I ever get a chance to work on them a bit more.

____________________________
109th Skywatcher

Here are some links to Things!

---

[Last edited by Xindaris at 01-11-2017 08:21 PM]

kieranmillar
Level: Smitemaster
Rank Points: 3027
Registered: 07-11-2014
IP: Logged

Thanks for the input guys.

Anyone know the name of the element in Spacetime Kerfluffle I missed off the list? I've not played it myself and my tactic of looking through the Hold Admin info for the hold it wasn't clear if there was an element there.

Similarly if anyone knows the actual names of the two GhostSmiters elements I'll happily include them both.

I'll take Torus and Persistence's bridge dropping off of the list.

Things I still need to do:
* Compile lists of voice actors for Chance for Paradise and J'mit2. Unfortunately for both of these there is not a clear list of who was voiced by who, and without knowing whho actually voiced which characters or pieces of text its a bit difficult for people to vote on.
* Compile list of LPers. Is the following list comprehensive? It's hard to keep track of this:
--- Chaco (Leylite)
--- Crimson Moon (DROD Central)
--- Jeff_Ray... (beethrobudkin07)
--- Lucky Luc (lutetiumpotassiumarsenic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eG7XrZeCyxw )
--- Nuntar (SentinelProxima)
--- Pearls (Pearls13a)
--- Paragusrants (on Twitch)
--- ThemsAllTook (Alex Diener)
--- Wafflem ( https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlDMIC0cEHj3x0CpBAlrT8j3Nl0odrSwH )

---

[Last edited by kieranmillar at 01-26-2017 12:19 AM]

Bent
Level: Delver
Rank Points: 92
Registered: 12-11-2015
IP: Logged

The Ghostsmiters elements are called “Undead Skull” and “Faded Ghost”, but the name of the last one is not mentioned anywhere outside of the editor, and it might be clearer to just call it “Bedsheet Ghost”.

Xindaris
Level: Smitemaster

Rank Points: 1593
Registered: 06-13-2015
IP: Logged

TSK's custom element thing is Temporal Echo.

____________________________
109th Skywatcher

Here are some links to Things!

kieranmillar
Level: Smitemaster
Rank Points: 3027
Registered: 07-11-2014
IP: Logged

Alright, I guess it's time to open up the nominations for the Community Contributior Award. This award is entirely driven by your nominations, so please contribute! For those who don't know what it is, this is an award that recognises contributions made by members that don't necessarily fit into the other categories. Anybody can be nominated for basically any reason at all. Here's how it works:

Send me a PM with a list of everyone you'd like to consider for this award. There's no limit to the number of people you're allowed to nominate, and if the list of nominees gets too large it will be culled to the 10 or so who had the most votes. However, for each nominee you must include at least one reason why you are nominating them. It doesn't have to be in-depth or anything, you just have to provide a reason. Also, you aren't allowed to nominate yourself.

Click here to PM me with your nominations!

kieranmillar
Level: Smitemaster
Rank Points: 3027
Registered: 07-11-2014
IP: Logged

Listing what I believe to be the full voice actor credits, for my use later:

Chance for Paradise (Thanks for pointing it out Nuntar!)

- Chaco (Delvon)
- CrimsonMoon's Mom (Mom)
- Crimson Moon (Punk Kid)
- Insoluble (Dad)
- Leah Irwin (Little Girl)
- Nuntar (Clerk)
- RabidChild (Zero)

J'mit2 (Can't guarantee this is 100% correct)

- Vladimir S. (Jmit)
- Eugeniy S. (everyone else?)

DezzTech
Level: Smiter
Rank Points: 327
Registered: 03-31-2009
IP: Logged

kieranmillar wrote:
--- Pegasusrants (on Twitch)

Paragusrants *

____________________________

kieranmillar
Level: Smitemaster
Rank Points: 3027
Registered: 07-11-2014
IP: Logged

Just gonna remind people about this post. Only 3 people have sent in nominations so far. Very low compared to the last two years.

kieranmillar wrote:
Alright, I guess it's time to open up the nominations for the Community Contributior Award. This award is entirely driven by your nominations, so please contribute! For those who don't know what it is, this is an award that recognises contributions made by members that don't necessarily fit into the other categories. Anybody can be nominated for basically any reason at all. Here's how it works:

Send me a PM with a list of everyone you'd like to consider for this award. There's no limit to the number of people you're allowed to nominate, and if the list of nominees gets too large it will be culled to the 10 or so who had the most votes. However, for each nominee you must include at least one reason why you are nominating them. It doesn't have to be in-depth or anything, you just have to provide a reason. Also, you aren't allowed to nominate yourself.

Click here to PM me with your nominations!

Dischorran
Level: Smitemaster

Rank Points: 3414
Registered: 09-10-2005
IP: Logged

Do skell and skell's face count as separate nominations? Not that I'm necessarily nominating either, mind you.

____________________________

kieranmillar
Level: Smitemaster
Rank Points: 3027
Registered: 07-11-2014
IP: Logged

A good point bought up in chat, I forgot to mention the actual dates for this stuff.

I plan for the Deadlies voting to begin on Feb 1st and run until the end of Feb. So less than a week to finish making comments and nominations!

kieranmillar
Level: Smitemaster
Rank Points: 3027
Registered: 07-11-2014
IP: Logged

Less than 24 hours to get your nominations in for Best Community Contributor. The Deadlies begin tomorrow! Get hype!

kieranmillar
Level: Smitemaster
Rank Points: 3027
Registered: 07-11-2014
IP: Logged

It's here!