I think a contest is a great idea, but I most certainly would not use
*every* level submitted as some of them may be subpar. I believe you should
choose the best levels from a contest, and then use any levels you create
yourself. As for prizes, well, I would definitely credit everyone in the
manual whose levels you use, and perhaps we can offer a discount on the
purchase of the game. Giving away a ton of carts isn't terribly feasible.
:)
As for the editor, to help make things easier, I highly recommend allowing
the user to create a 4K binary of the game that only includes a selected
level. This would allow people to test their levels before submitting them,
and would take a lot of workload off of you. You could then ask people to
simply send you the binary, making it easier for you to test. If you were
to do this, you might want to state that these binaries are not to be
distributed so you don't have 50 unique versions of Bounce! floating around.
Perhaps you could cripple these "level demo" binaries in some fashion. Or
if you're not concerned about that, we can post each binary to the contest
page so people can download each levels (or at least ones that interest
them) and try them out.
..Al
----- Original Message -----
From: "Fabrizio Zavagli" <rasty@xxxxxxxxx>
To: "Stella" <stella@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, September 23, 2003 2:27 PM
Subject: [stella] Bounce: what next?
> Hello everyone!
>
> I've come to a point in the development of "Bounce!" that requires some
wise
> words of advice, and therefore it's time to post to the list :)
>
> Right now most of the gameplay is in, maybe I will add some more brick and
> tweaks, but the basics will likely stay the same (level size, etc.).
>
> So I've started working on a level editor for "Bounce!", and I'm facing
the
> possibility, like it has already been briefly discussed here, of having
some
> kind of level creation contest and include a lot of user-submitted levels
in
> the final game. This is where things could get hard: if I do the contest,
> should I get lucky and people will actually like creating levels, I could
> end up with quite some levels to test! Not only test, but also rank by
> difficulty and eventually judge for some prize (how to judge remains to be
> defined as well!!)..
> Also, if the levels in the final version will really be a lot (a 32k cart
> could contain hundreds), I'm not even sure that it will still make sense
> having the player go throu them all in order to complete the game.. but I
> don't really know how to do otherwise!
>
> To sum it up, I could do the contest and accept all the levels (with all
of
> the above troubles), accept a limited number (will still be hard to
choose),
> or just kill the idea of the contest (the levels would be around 30 in
such
> case, likely created by me?). In the last option, I could still release
the
> editor and let everyone change levels to create their very own version of
> "Bounce!" :)
>
> So, I really don't know what to do now.. words of advice are badly
> needed!!!!
>
> Thanks in advance and ciao!
> Fabrizio.-
>
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