How are our ratings, Bob?
BYOND developer Lummox JR has given everyone a bit of an oversight into how the BYOND search and game rankings work. The rating system can be very briefly summarised by the following three questions:
"Is the game a BYOND favorite?
Does it have screenshots?
What is its overall BYOND rank?"
This raises another question, what's a BYOND favorite?
"BYOND favorites are determined by the listings of our banner guilds. Mostly the criteria for what comprises a banner guild is whether the guild has a well-defined genre, its game list exclusively holds games of that type, and whether the guild has a decent size in terms of number of members. (A list of these guilds shows up when you look for games in the pager.) If a banner guild lists your game among their favorites, your game is a BYOND favorite and will get preferential listing in the search."
Good stuff. So if you feel as though your game is lagging a bit when it comes to its search result order, this should give you a good idea of where to look to improve. The main 5 BYOND guilds will be more than happy to answer your questions about their favorites process, just give them a post on their forums.
There may be riches under those rocks!
Mechana2412 has reviewed one of BYOND Casual's rising star games, Tomb Explorer. In a nutshell, Tomb Explorer puts you keep in the middle of ancient maze tombs. Your objective is simple, grab that gold and get out of there! Doors reveal new areas of the tomb, some lead to your exit, others seek to waste precious time. The game's creator, Foomer, has really thrown down the power of 4.0 with this one, resulting in a unique and click-tastic puzzler for all skill ranges.
Oh Mapmaker Mapmaker, make me a map.
Tom and company have been busy beavers, addressing your BYOND feature requests. An interesting one that has re-surfaced is map saving and loading in DM. It seems that now BYOND has entered its feature development cycle, support in DM for loading and saving maps at runtime maybe be possible. As we noted last week, BYOND has raised its runtime limits. Seems to be that the new limits might cause this feature a headache, because the .dmm map format still uses an old style to refer to things on your maps. Technical woes or no, it's something that is being looked at.
BYOND Anime reworks submissions.
Masterdan has reworked the way submissions are handled. This is in a drive to make the process real slick: fast responses and fair reviews. If you've got some cool new original Anime game, things are certainly looking up for you!
A Question to the Community: Ideas for Contests?
BYOND has been a bit shy on the contests lately, so we thought we'd go and pop the question.
1) Which guilds would you most like to see new contests for?
2) What kind of contests would you like to see? (We like stuff that makes people create, finish or advertise projects outside of BYOND!)
Just a few miscellaneous things. Alathon has slung a rope around MySQL, and is taming it for use in Multi-Server Games. Next week the digest should be able to bring you a bit of a scoop on a draft BYOND Achievements system, as well as all the latest from around your net dream, until then, take care!
Nice article :)
1) BYOND Anime guild. 2) Like the Action guild has, a GIAW contest would be great to have, or something similar that raises competivity. | |
another global byond contest like the mystery one they did way back when when they launched byond memberships.
| |
Neato torpedo. Now to just replace every "unoriginal" graphic in my originally coded anime related game and maybe I'll be getting somewhere.
| |
1) BYOND RPG and BYOND Arcade
2) I'd like to see a contest to make a really good RPG, with a real storyline, on screen menus (no inputs and alerts!), party system, etc. A real, full fledged, awesome RPG. Like what DWOv2 should've been. Would expect an extended timeline, 2-4months. | |
As far as listed guilds in the drop-down menu, I would go for a BYOND Anime contest. For users to bring a new basis for an anime outside of the hyped up shows out in the US now a days.
As far as BYOND's unlisted guild(No idea if it is just lingering around now, or completely abandoned) is a BYOND Arcade contest for an old-gen console game to be perhaps ported over to BYOND, or given a new look.(That I would gladly support as far as prizes, and rewards go) | |
Abel Nightroad wrote:
As far as listed guilds in the drop-down menu, I would go for a BYOND Anime contest. For users to bring a new basis for an anime outside of the hyped up shows out in the US now a days. Two problems with that though.. People would never play games of an anime they haven't watch, because they wouldn't understand anything of it. Secondly, the Anime guild is only for Japanese animations, or so it says in the guild banner. | |
How about a guild-independent contest? The goal is to simply design a game and then make it. Graphics and sound don't matter. Entries are judged based on whether a design document (formal or informal) were present, and whether the game played out like the design document described.
| |
That single player rpg guild would be great. I get the feeling that BYOND has hardly scratched the surface of that genre.
| |
I think BYOND really needs to dig into what it was originally intended for - MUDs, roguelikes, and the like. I think a Roguelike In A X competition could really help that. Maybe paired with a MUD In A X. X should probably be reasonably long, because you want to get polished games out the other end - maybe Half A Year (RIAHAY and MIAHAY!). Encourage programmers to experiment and do interesting things. Give out awards in a few categories - so a few awards for highly polished entries, a few awards for entries with some awesome features that maybe didn't quite pan out, awards for games with the best art, the best soundtrack, the best interface.
Doesn't really encourage people to create, finish, or advertise projects outside of BYOND - unless they're dumped onto some roguelike or MUD site en-masse or people start discussions outside of BYOND on roguelike or MUD forums about developing in BYOND - but it could generate some very high quality games, with some extremely interesting features. | |
Jp wrote:
I think BYOND really needs to dig into what it was originally intended for - MUDs, roguelikes, and the like. I think a Roguelike In A X competition could really help that. Maybe paired with a MUD In A X. X should probably be reasonably long, because you want to get polished games out the other end - maybe Half A Year (RIAHAY and MIAHAY!). Encourage programmers to experiment and do interesting things. Give out awards in a few categories - so a few awards for highly polished entries, a few awards for entries with some awesome features that maybe didn't quite pan out, awards for games with the best art, the best soundtrack, the best interface. That would be awesome, but it's hard to find game designers willing to work on MUD's/Roguelikes. I myself, can't think enough to make a game like those alone, and nowadays, it's hard to find a game designer who will spend their time on a MUD/roguelike. | |
I would like to see contests that directly address and help to improve weak spots both in BYONDs design and the community.
The basic idea to build your own net dream has an obvious disadvantage. Unlike professional game design, it discourages interdisciplinary cooperation. Now, while there are certainly some gifted people who are talented in more than one way, I do not think that this described the average customer of BYOND. Some might have an artistic talent, be it with graphics, music/sound, designing games, or writing stories. Others might have an easy time writing effective source code, or designing game dynamics. Now, within the community of BYOND, teamwork is often a tricky issue, which already starts with finding people willing to join and work on a project. This is where I think a contest might find a great hook, to speak in object oriented programming terms. Suggestions for contests: * Art-1 Games may be subscribed to the contest (and get reviewed by the judges to ensure a certain quality and originality) in the first step. Then artists are encouraged to play these games in order to get a feeling for what kind of art would fit the game at hand. The goal is to provide graphics and/or sound/music. This is a win-win situation, as the game developer gets players and has the chance to enhance the visual appeal of her game (which in return helps BYOND with presenting itself to the outside world). A prepared template has to ensure that there is no copyright infringement by the artist and should cover under which terms the created art is released/used. This contest is best held by a mixture of banner guilds and the Art Society/Audiophiles. *Art-2 Since detailed design documents are a rare sight on BYOND, yet, some people have (good) ideas for a game, there could be a little article/introduction on creating (professional) design documents, followed by two separate contest, one for the best design document and one for the best realisation of one of these documents. This would ensure that people learn on how to structure their projects and could allow people who have lack programming skill to "have the game of their dreams built", while presenting BYOND with some creative new games. The contest would suite either a specific banner guild, or even Dream Makers, as it encourages the "Classified Ads" principle. *Art-3 A contest for the best video. Creating a professional, good looking video presentation of a specific game, or (even worse) of BYOND games in general is tricky, yet well capable of helping BYOND to show itself to the outside world in the "good light" that it deserves. This would blend in well with the newly established youtube group and could be used on future press releases or on adverts/the BYOND start page. This might fit into the "Art society". *Programming-1 While the authoring tool BYOND simplifies the task of creating games, it does not mean that learning how to create a game is indeed simple. This is part of the reason BYOND faces a large amount of games that base on the same source code (a.k.a rips). A contest could provide both incentive and possibility to work on ones skills. A group of judges would prepare simple tasks (one at a time) and afterwards comment on the provided solutions, together with showing how each of the judges would have solved the issue on her own. This does not only help people to improve, but shows the multitude of ways that programmers can use to handle a problem at hand. This contest would favour Dream Makers. *Programming-2 There are often times when a lot of people are asking for a simple, yet effective solution for a problem on the forum. A contest to create libraries for exactly these kind of problems could help to get better games for BYOND through good libraries and to encourage reasonable programming strategies. This contest could be held by some of the banner guilds with problems specific for their kind of featured games. I'm sorry that this comment grew a bit "out of size" and thank you for the patience while reading through it. Constructive criticism/discussion would be welcome. | |
What about having each guild submit a game. Team effort anyone?
Which guild has the "best community" capable of pulling off a team effort. :) ts | |
Make a contest for somone to make a sportsgame because im growing bored of byond without them.
| |
Contest ideas that I like:
- Telnet-compatible games. - Platformers. And I mean pixel-based, not grid-based. - Games with randomly generated content. This includes roguelikes. - Co-op games with 2 or more developers working on different aspects, code, graphics, sound, content, etc... Half the reward awarded for winning the contest. Second half of the reward awarded for finishing the game to the contest-holder's satisfaction. | |
2) I believe I stated that above on accident.