At your mark, get set, go!

You now have 408 hours to complete an RPG. Here are the rules:

1. Contestants may use any pre-existing public vc library in the construction of their entries.

1a. Battle systems, Menu systems, and other such subsystems will not be accounted for their individual merits and flaws, but rather on their overall affect on the feel of the game. Including complementary subsystems will raise your grade, distractionary susbsystems will detract, and not having any at all (IE, making a Sully 1-like RPG) will mean that it's just not taken into consideration and you will only be judged based on what is there.

2. The originality of art and music will not be judged at all. Any aesthetic judging will be blind to originality, and instead will focus on presentation and use. In layman's terms: you can rip tiles from commercial games, or use public tilesets, but you will only get a good grade if the maps are well-assembled. Trust me, making a good map out of tiles is just as hard as making good tiles.

5. The judging method shall be the same as the previous official competition, excepting that the above points about subsystems and originality will be enforced.

5a. The judges for this competition will be announced no later than 12:01 AM EST on June 25th.

5b. There will be no less than 3 judges, although only 3 need to be announced by the deadline in rule 5a. (ie: there may be more judges this time, and secret ones at that! ;)

5c. The judgements will announced no later than one week from the end of the contest. This grace period allows adequate time for going through each entry, allowing each it's fair time in court, and gives the judges ample time to write a meaningful judgement.

6. The prize for this contest is a tangible object to be sent to the first place entry. Only one prize will be granted, regardless of how many members there are in a team. We're not made of money, you know! ;)

6a. We may extend prizes frather than announced at our own discretion, as in the previous two contests, but do not count on it.

7. The contest will conclude at 11:59 PM EST on Sunday, July 4th.

8. The following are the strict requirements for all entries:

8a. The goal of this contest is to create a small, complete RPG.

8b. An RPG is defined within this contest as an interactive story. Tell an interesting story, and tell it well, and you will do well. Content and execution both count.

8c. The length of this game shall be no less than 4 seperate maps with distinct tilesets.

8c. The length of this game shall be no less than 4 seperate playable maps, and 4 distinct tilesets. A playable map is defined as one where a player entity may run around and trigger events (towns, dungeons, overworlds, etc.). To meet the tileset requirement, the only non-playable maps that have tilesets that will count towards the total number of distincts will be maps that are constructed in a fashion so that they *could* be playable maps, but are not for plot reasons (IE, secret meeting rooms of the Council of Doom for cutscenes, etc..).

8d. There is no minimum requirement for cast size. However, if you make an RPG without any characters in it, you'd better pull it off really cleverly.

8e. The only *required* subsystem is a load/save script, due to the implicit length of the entries. This is not a hard task, and if any teams need assistance, McGrue will help you. This is a point of convenience for the judges.

8f. A readme file is required. The readme file must be in .txt or .html format, and contain the name of your team, the names of your teammates, and their roles. In addition, any neccesary control information unique to the game must be included here. If something neccesary is missing from the documentation (ie. press space to start the game when the screen turns red, or else your computer will crash, etc... stuff like that), it will be counted against you.

9. Failure to comply with any of Rule #8's subpoints is grounds for disqualification. This is the "No Balls of Steel" rule. Sorry guys. ;)

10. The management (mcgrue) reserves the right to add or apend rules with adequate warning via the main page of verge-rpg.com if circumstances warrant such a change.

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And that's it. As for subject matter, it's all up to you. Make it interesting. And if any points need clarification, ask away and I'll update the rules with my clarified answer.

Apologies for speeling misteaks. I R TRD.

Edit: Also, apologies for rules 3 and 4 being missing. They are apparently on double-secret probation. Or I forgot to renumber while I was editing the old rules and removed them ;)

To all interested in competing, but worried about art:

I will be releasing a number of old SotS tilesets that I no longer have use for into the public domain. They are of varying goodness, but they are open to all to use.

For the interested, this is not a sign of SotS's deathknell... it's a sign that I'm not going to use my earliest art because it really clashes with all the pretty things I make these days ;)

Yeah, that's the annoying thing about projects. You want to do the cool stuff first, but by the time you're done, all the early stuff looks bad and you have to redo it!

Edit: By the way, if anyone is thinking of using my BS for this compo, I anticipate having it in much sexier condition within the next four days or so.

I always get a bit nervous when I announce a contest and there's not a big outpouring of people scrambling for team members on the boards. Damn you kids and your IMs!

In other news, I have around 20 tilesets to donate. However, I'm having trouble converting them to the v3 format, so that'll have to wait until vecnar is available (hopefully later tonite).

Dude, let it lie. 4 teams is a retardedly huge number. On the off-chance you have free time despite that workload, just make the music for those teams that much better.

It hasn't come up for me -- the parser I'm doing for the LBS crashes on a nonblank line containing unrecognized parameters. It checks if a line is blank by stripping spaces and tabs and then seeing if what it has left over is equal to "", and I don't think that would work if it had any cr/lf type stuff in there.

Ahaha.

I was considering putting a little one in DD:HH:MM:SS format over in the sidebar. But I haven't yet.

Quote:Originally posted by Buckermann

Quote:Originally posted by Kildorf

Hey, on a compo-related note, I'm a huge dork and have put up a count-downer!

For me it looks like the minutes are decreasing every second...

o_O That's bizaare... well... a clock and some good old subtraction will probably work better than my dumb little javascript counter anyway. ^_^ Especially if it is counting down minutes as seconds. o_O

Quote:Originally posted by Gayo

Dude, let it lie. 4 teams is a retardedly huge number. On the off-chance you have free time despite that workload, just make the music for those teams that much better.

I would suggest not posting about topics you know nothing about.

1) 4 teams is not a retardedly huge number at all, for a composer. I doubt the fourth project will happen anyhow.
2) Its summer for me, I have infinite free time. With the exception of some sort of immense catastrophe that keeps me away from the computer, I am pretty much set to work on the HoV as much as I need to.
3) I can only go so long on one song before I get tired of it. It is far more interesting to produce many good diverse songs than a few similar great songs. Funky Fight is completely different than Snowscape, which is completely different from Angelwing (pr2's project that didn't make it in time for the last HoV, which is NES style).
4) There is no goddamn reason for me not to try to help as many people as possible. I don't want to see ripped music, and unless you are going to compose for Interference, he is probably going to do exactly that. So let me fucking help him, and mind your own goddamn business.

Thank you.

Oh ho! What are you suggesting my motivation is then? To be honest I would like to see more original music in these HoVs besides my own, but since that doesn't happen I try to make the best of it. Its not like I went around asking to do music for people during the HoV. Snowscape was my project, I am inolved with pr2, and SDHawk said something pitiful like "I need a catchy tune for my battle system...." in IRC. I had extra time on my hands, so I offered to help. Yes, I was very busy the whole time. I was freaking out becuase I had no good song concepts a couple days before the deadline. But once the funk got in me I had a lot of fun working for SD and I'm glad I joined that team.

I don't see why my motivation is ridiculous, but I suppose I also want to keep busy and be productive as much as possible, becuase I have little else to do, and I don't want to waste my summer. Maybe that is justification enough, perhaps not. Either way, its good enough for me. And if I work hard I can do several songs in 30 hours, its not that hard.

Also, Interference, send me an email.