UA 2008: Official Forum Favorite voting!

Foooooood fiiiiiiight

 

This isn't an attack on one side. I'm addressing both sides.

I don't care about posts on other forums, journals or MySpace. Promoting your work is part of a successful game but concerns shouldn't be dismissed or ridiculed cuz someones friends don't like the criticism or someone is new. Maybe they're all long time lurkers and first time posters. If complaining is "silly" then why is the other side making such a fuss too? Cuz it isn't silly and it matters to both sides?

I don't know if someonewhoknows or any of the people who brought up the issue have a personal grudge against dock. I'll give swk the benefit of the doubt just like I'm giving dock's supporters the same but I'm disappointed at comments like "sore-loser mentality" and "he doesn't count as a person" in the lj link. You're stupid and your voice doesn't matter rebuttals are childish and I hate seeing that used by people here. Hell, this issue has come up before but it didn't mean the speaker had it out for the competition.

http://www.sweatdrop.com/forum/showthread.php?t=9906&page=7

"If i was in charge of doing these votey things, id have the company wittle the entries from 100 or whatever down to 20, twenty that meet all the comp criteria, and more importantly the look they want. Then let the public vote it down to 5, then the company picks their winners from that. At least that way the company is happy, the fans still get to vote And it more or less kills the issue of friend/ family voting, or at least reduces it."

With so many games and limited voting current members future contest should be open to new members but I suggest something like the above. There be a first round to determine finalists then there is a second vote excluding anyone who joined in the past X weeks.

 

This is the greatest game in the world!

 

Is it just me or is the Flashbang posse overdoing it just a little bit? :roll:

 

Wow, a few hours ago Off-Road Velociraptor had about 11 votes and now about four hours later they have 57 votes. Also today about 60+ new people joined the forum with virtually no info about them.

I would suggest that Unity instead of giving one prize for the Forum Favorite category they give all the entrants a choice of smaller prizes:

$50.00 cash or
$100.00 discount on future purchases
etc...

I think all of the contenders worked very hard on their games, and they should all be proud of their work and not be discouraged from entering other contests in the future. I think the spirit of this part of the contest was to have the people on the forums judge their piers (and that sounded like a good plan). The flaw here is that I can set up unlimited emails on my server and vote as many times as I want. I am not saying anyone has done that but it seems like an easy thing to do.

 

To be transparent, here's what we're up to:

We started promoting the audience voting today. We aren't flat-out telling people "go vote for Raptor Safari". Every one of our messages to users mentions Tumbledrop and RastaMonkey by name (excellent games, both)! And I think in general there are a lot of great titles in the lineup here.

Examples of where we're talking about it:

- http://www.fun-motion.com/
- http://blurst.com/blog/

We also sent an email to our most prolific Raptor Safari players, which also mentions Tumbledrop and RastaMonkey by name. Of the stuff I did today, I'm sure this will be most effective for our votes. If someone's played a few hundred of games of Raptor Safari, their vote is probably going our way. We didn't tap our whole user base (which is 100k accounts, 15k or so with emails attached). Total emails sent is just in the 3 figures.

A TIGSource post should be going up sometime soon, too (not authored by us--just dropped them a line, along with some other indie news sources). More traffic equals more eyes on Unity content and more eyes on the award.

More generally:

Audience awards are a strange beast. I think the problems in this thread stem from the fact that there are two types of audience awards, and it's not clear which is the focus here.

The first type is that all voters are strongly encouraged or even required to play all games. The percentage of votes then represents the user's pick from all of the games, as if they were judging them in a contest. It's expected that Unity themselves will score this way, for instance.

The second type is basically a popularity contest. Entrants tap their players and communities and encourage people to check out the contest (with the obvious implication/hope of voting for their game). This is actually a little sneaky, because it's basically entrants using their resources to promote the contest. A contest may have awards for art, programming, and audio skills; this is basically the award for marketing skills.

We're engaged in the second type, a "get out of the vote" push. Sure, many of the people will reach on our own sites will lean our way. It's kind of like calling a registered Democrat list and reminding them to vote. They'll probably vote Democratic!

Like the USA, though, voter turnout is hard to get. This thread has 3,000 views and not even 200 votes. Fun-Motion has a few thousand views a day, but only a small percentage will click through to the thread. Still, promotion is good, especially when it's promoting the common cause of Unity and Unity-made content.

 

Thanks for the update, so basically...

 

Heh, not really. It's more like "You know, we have some websites and a bunch of players who have played our games. I guess we should tell some of them about this voting thing."

 

Raptor Safari is a great game with a large fanbase, it makes sense that it would get a lot of support when its fans are given the opportunity to vote, and deservedly so.

 

Yep, lets be honest, we would all do the same thing if we could. I'll still picture you like the guys in that image until you buy us all a drink
cheers

 

We're buying quite a few drinks at Unite, if you'll be there! http://unity3d.com/unite/unity-mingle

Dock: Thanks!

 

I guess we'll have to spoil the surprise we had planned all along to soothe nerves, we're planning on a base level prize for all entrants anyway.

 

Well having amassed zero votes as well I too won't worry about any controversy or indeed any recounts.

Mathew is a solid forum member who helps out others. If he wants to push his game then I don't feel aggrieved by it at all. He gives more than he takes so thats good enough for me.

I voted for Feist which is truly inspirational, prolly one of the best games I have ever played or seen - quite brilliant, well done guys.

 

I voted for Traces of Illumination. It's a multiplayer game that's extremely fun, so it has more replayability than any of the other games I played.

Heh! Turret Master needs to be more polished before I get any votes at all. I could get my small forum population to vote for it, but there'd be no point. I don't even have 75 members yet. ^_^

 

RastaMonkey is definitely the best!

 

Nice! I retract my stupid joke, now I picture you more like friendly Cylons...

JUST KIDDING

Unfortunately, we can't make it to Unite this year :cry:, it sounds like it is going to be such a landmark event.... Unity history in the making. It would have been so great to meet all of you guys in person. Oh well, we'll be there in thoughts for sure.

 

History will happen for the second year in a row no less... Unite '08 is gonna ROCK!

A nice part of that are all the great UA entries, including those fighting for forum favorite status. If there is any additional constructive feedback let's pipe that in to Sam (or me if necessary) so we can keep iterating and make each contest we offer better than the one before it.

Onwards and upwards we go!

 

Aww, man!

 

Maybe next year Unity could have a collaboration with an on-line gaming site and have actual players vote .

Anyway, I wish I could come to Unite and meet you all in person.
Best of luck everybody!

Matthew - Thanks!

 

Hey what cha sayin etoiles Cylons aren't naturally friendly?

Shame we dont have a game ready for this, would have been fun to join in with all the voting controversy

My vote goes for Feist mainly for its great design style, but Raptor Safari comes a very close second as it was that game which impressed and turned me on to Unity in the first place, oh I also like Rasta monkey too, Kudos to everyone...

See you at Unite

 

Well I can see that few have voted for the Super Volei Brasil - and I have to say WOW! Thats an awesome entry - if you haven't looked yet please do - its an EXCELLENT entry.

 

Well, you know, those recently laid off east Hollywood Cylons can be pretty aggressive

 

3 Votes! One of them is mine, but still...
And cool HiggyB, I'd love a basic entry prize. Sounds excellent. How are you guys affording all of this giving money away?

 

Amazing!:!::!:

I have to admit that before today I haven't really seen many of these, but... These are fantastic:!:

So much for sleep! between trying to get a brontosaur to fly (properly) and figuring out why I'm even addicted to that black fuzz ball (I have no idea what he's there to do, but I love the game!! The mood reminds me of Abe's oddworld).

Congratulations to all the entrants!

Sincerely,

Galen

 

velociraptor safari no doubt.

 

If I could place a bet for the other category, I'd put it on downhill bowling...

 

Hehe! 236 members have joined since this vote was announced. That's around 40 members per day. I guess this was a good technique for getting people to drop by, if only for a little while.

 

My mother had a nice time here, although it was pretty frustrating explaining to her how to register and why did she have to spell the word "unity".

 

I hope the next year there will be some kind of voting with points, i.e. from your most favourite game (5 points) to your least (1 point). It's sad that we had to choose between so many quality games. :wink:

 

I agree that's ok to invite a fan base (family and friends included) to vote on a game. That's fair given that this is not an hardcore underground please-dont-play-my-games comunity. Given that you want to have a game in the market someday.

I'm just happy to participate and to have (kind of) sucessfuly developed a game from start to finish with just one friend (I'm the programmer, he's the graphic artist) in only two months, in our spare time at the university.

My only coment about this contest category is that (for me) this is just not a FORUM-FAVORITE anymore. It's not unfair, but it lost the purpose IMHO. I didn't invite anybody to vote on my game so it doesn't have a chance anyway.

We have a bigger game project ahead of us now (start in a fez months) and the team will grow a lot, so I hope next year we'll make it to Unite and meet some of you guys.

 

Hay guys, there is no beating Offroad Velociraptor Safari! Just telling ya. Play it sometime.

 

I've played it already more than once and I just don't agree...

 

Since we keep on getting these Offroad Velociraptor Safari one-liners and there is no other thread to discuss, I\'ll pitch in here:

The graphics, sounds and controls are nice, but to me it is still more of a sandbox demo than a full game at the moment. It is too focused on controls and physics, in my opinion it is missing clear objectives and progression. It just didn\'t pull me in.

 

Hordes of Orcs !

I have wasted so much time playing this tower of defense it's ridiculously addictive.

This game is one of the reason I bought Unity, so blame bt, I mean thank him.

And you can't beat the trailer

if there was a "thumbs up" emoticon, I'd use 10 of them, all right maybe a 100

 

Here, borrow mine:

 

Let's keep the criticism out of this thread please. ^_^

It's a thread of positivity and celebration of achievements in Unity! It's fantastic that there is such a great turnout, and I'm already excited about the prospects of next year's competition.

 

Thanks to your emoticon, Tom, my masterpiece is complete

 

Truly a masterpiece!!!

 

The forum favorite vote was just fine. You can't really do a community favorite category that easily when a large portion of the community doesn't come to Unite.

The big festivals like IGF or E3 can handle it much easier, as they can limit voting to the attendees and have them walk up and vote personally. Sure, friends and family can vote for your entry, but they'd have to attend the festival to do so.

Speaking of which...... Anyone want to go from success in this forum to an entry in the IGF? I know I'm planning to once I get my game up to an acceptable level of development.

 

I could see where your getting but have you seen the achievements? don't play this on the blurst site yet. They haven't made achievements possible. Go to the official site and just try to get all the achievements.

 

On the same note..... Achievements don't make a game. They're a bonus, not a purpose. It's probably just me, but I like to have games with some sort of story mode with clear objectives. Sure, you can play to get achievements, but that's not that fun an experience after an hour or so.

The problem is that Velociraptor Safari doesn't have enough longevity. You can do everything in a relatively short time.

If it was multiplayer, if it had a story mode of some sort, and/or if it had some sort of level or purchase system (new cars, upgrades to the car, something like that), it would be my favorite by far. However, it was fun, but it didn't last long enough.

 

Honestly, I am surprised that both multiplayer games this year didn't fair a bit better in the forum favorite vote. Anyone have ideas on why this might be?

Talk about "longevity" - multiplayer takes it to a whole new dimension!

I think it might be simply because factors like long term enjoyment potential don't get included in the psychological metrics calculations of the average voters 3 minute game tests as they are skimming the list, but it could be something else entirely that I am missing.


Disclaimer: I am the Mars Explorer guy

 

No idea. I think that Jashan's TraceOn is really well polished and lots of fun. I was surprised at how few votes it received. I showed it to a friend's kid this weekend and he was soon addicted to it. Admittedly the kid also like the Velociraptor mayhem.

 

When I first read the description for TraceOn / Traces of Illumination, I thought the idea of 3D "snake" sounded somewhat boring, but after playing it, all I could say was "Wow!".

Jashan: you did a really nice job building such an interesting, polished, and immersive game out of such a simple concept. I wish you the best of luck for the other awards!

 

Thank you! ;-)

I think the tricky thing with multiplayer games is that it's much more involved testing them. Basically, to test a multiplayer game properly you need a whole bunch of people playing the game - all at the same time.

One of the interesting things when you host a multiplayer game in its early stage (when there's not a lot of people playing, yet) is when you follow the logs: User logged in, stayed for a moment or two, probably wondered where everyone else was, logged off. A few minutes later, the next user logs in, sees no one, logs off.

That said: Even though a lot of work and polishing went into Traces of Illumination (previously called TraceOn ;-) ), there's still quite some work to do, including fixing some problems that more or less frequently occur with multiplayer. I'll keep everyone posted (after Unite, I'm on vacation, and after that, I'll finish the game and create a little 2 minute teaser movie which should say more the many words I tend to write ;-) ).

 

Jashan -- did you consider implementing bots?

 

I understand what you are saying Jashan, and I am sure that a lack of users would be an important factor, but that wasn't the case with Mars Explorer. When I checked this morning, there were 73 active players online (which is totally typical) - and I have bots implemented too - so there were plenty of users for voters to play against. It didn't help me much though, because as far as I can guess based upon the activity on the Mars Explorer forums, nearly all the votes Mars Explorer received came from members of it's own community.

What I am really excited for is the iPhone kit to be released tomorrow! I have some ideas for Mars Explorer on the iPhone that will put it lightyears ahead of all the current iPhone games

 

Can someone explain to me where the built in voting is located, I've browsed around for a while and I haven't seen it.

Edit: I just noticed voting closed up today, an email reminder to the contestants would have been nice, but I guess I should have been checking the forum more often.

Also I've been reading all the posts about what's right and what's wrong when it comes to voting. While I do agree that leaving it open for everyone might lead to abuse for the voting system, it's just the way the organizers made it and there's no reason to cry about it.

Atleast in our case we love our games and everybody in the team will vote either Indie Riffs or CloudWitch, even the people who haven't signed up for the forum but are still part of the team who worked so hard to make this games.

So if you feel your game rocks and should win but people are cheating you out of your price, just wait until the Gameplay or overal game winners are announced, outside people can't vote for those ;-)

 

... now from my iPod touch from the Savoy WLAN: I have bots which I use for the load-tests, for instance. But playing with bots is pretty much like playing single-player - kind of a lonely experience for a multiplayer game ;-)

I think the big fun really starts when you set up something like a Skype voice conference and actually talk with the people you play with while you're playing. So I think creating multiplayer games is in the end really about creating a community of, um, active players ;-)

So, still some work to do for me ;-)

Hey, and gratz for frequently having around 70 players online - that's quite an achievement! I think that's already quite a reward in itself!