Unity Community Art Challenge - May 2015 - The Shroom Of Doom

@Sheriziya I usually post several times on Twitter, Google+ and Reddit (Unity). I hardly see people retweet or share apart from a few ones who always do.

 

Yeah I really try to share everywhere I can, but my popularity on the internet is the same as in real life.... so... =P

 

I think I may get way too many tweets from too many users.... Yours might have gone lost amidst the many

Hmmm.... You can't publicize a post from the forum or Sketchfab directly to Twitter, right? Like you can with wordpress? Cause that could help too.

ETA: Is it an idea to post about future challenges on LinkedIn? I belong to a few gamedev (and alike) groups. It could perhaps get the word out to a wider audience that way.

 

I would try to make this month a "freestyle" month for me, no themes, just some few assets/scenes/characters/props that will be uploaded to sketchfab, and then I'd promote the upcoming contest next month to the facebook groups like Blender, Indie Game Developers, Indie Game Chat, Blender Artists, 3D Artists groups, etc.
The art that I'll make could help gather attention(I'll state that the prizes for the next July contest would be a Sketchfab PRO upgrade) , and then I'll be linking the Showcase forums page to inform other artists..
I hope this plan works out..

 

HUm.. No themes at all? I wont agree here! I think contests are contests because they are based on themes, or at least, on something that you are supposed to achieve. Well, I'd love to see a June UCAC but I understand the need of renewal. The Freestyle might work based on some theme like, at least '' make a cyberpunk character or scene '' or '' make a medieval prop or environment '' but again, I really liked the last 2 months themes '' chest of wonders '' and '' shroom of doom''. Simple phrases full of character and charisma.

 

No, I mean just for the stuff that I'll make and share on the other groups(no theme weekly or daily challenge for me) , while promoting this challenge for july

 

Hey @Thomas Pasieka. Adam Bromell (@adambromell on twitter) is one of the co-owners of polycount. He will be a good person to contact!

http://www.polycount.com/about/ - there is a list of the polycount peeps on there too

PS: I'm also teessider on polycount too

 

I like your ideas! I'm still working on my chest of wonders and my short GDD (want to have both ready before Unite Europe 2015), so I probably won't start anything else.
But perhaps it's an idea if artists from previous challenges who didn't win a prize, but did participate with a finished entry (or perhaps an entry which wasn't finished yet, but is finished now), report/retweet/re-FB or whatever and promote the upcoming contest as well?

It would be handy, if we'd know for sure there will be a challenge next month and, if there is one, what the theme/subject will be

Maybe a few professional artists can pick their favorite winning piece of each of the nine challenges? And perhaps give a theme/subject for next month and post about that?

 

A few obvious ideas, but I'll state them anyway for the sake of discussion:

• Prizes - It's a guess, but I'm fairly certain that the Xmas contest was one of the most participated. The potential reward of a Unity Pro license was an obvious motivator, so maybe a bigger 'carrot' could be the answer.

• Publicity - I only stumbled across the contests by accident. Twitter is spammy, and I didn't see the contest announced on any of the main Unity news places. Would a post in the main Blog with contest winners / next contest details be out of the question? Can't enter something if you don't know it exists!

• Frequency - Do you think there'd be more participants in a bi-monthly contest? What about seasonal / quarterly? It could still be a month long challenge but more space between them might let more people organise time to take part. This would also fit well with the previous 2 points - not spamming the main Unity PR channels with community things, and makes the prizes more meaningful / less costly.

Even in the months I haven't submitted an entry, I have toyed around with ideas of what I could do and kept a close eye on these threads to see all the awesome things everyone else has made. It would be great if this could continue in some way

 

Youhou! 3rd place! thank you guys! my first contest entries! it's quite motivating! so, when is the next contest??? ^^

 

If I don't join one of these it's usually because I don't have any good ideas that fit the theme. What if you gave 2-3 different themes, and allowed each participant to choose 1 of them?

Also sometimes I don't find enough time.

 

So any suggestions for an aofficial hashtag we can use on twitter? #UCAC is already in use for various things

 

#UnityChallenge

 

Alright, that sounds good, thx!

 

Maybe #unity3dchallenge would be better? #unitychallenge gives..... other things.

 

I'd like an optional official badge below the avatar or for my signature.

 

Just my 5 cents, for me it was hard to stumble upon this challange. Somehow it was not obvious for me to find an art challange under Showcase.

So I discovered it only a month ago, started to work on my shroom for this challange but had a problem with my system and no backups of current work. I wanted to give it a try this June again.

Maybe a separate forum section only for challanges could help. Maybe run not just an art challange but also small game jams or similar things like a competition for scripting an Editor tool there.

Maybe a 2 month time frame could help some to get their work finished and show up here, I can imagine other guys started but not posted for various reasons.

A competition only for guys who already won in the past could be interesting and mentioning winners more public maybe in a Blog post could be nice.

 

I want to add to the people saying: "I usually did not see the challanges."

Of course there are other factors like when you really want to enter a challenge but then work or other things get in the way. Usually I really had to actively remember that there were regular community challanges and I had to seek them out on the subforums. On Tiwitter I never got anything. Probably because I am not following Thomas and also because Twitter is a good plattform to reach a lot of people but also a good plattform to drown important information in mere minutes.
Google Plus is still pretty much dead. And despite I am even being one of the guys who does subscribe to /r/Unity3D on Reddit I can assure that I never once recall to having seen an art challenge in my feed (or on Twitter or on Google+).

I think the best thing would be to have it promoted on the forums a little more prominent in some way. Social media is super saturated and drowns a lot information very quickly - even more so if it's not super popular social media.

I don't think that a community challange with already rather low participation rate would benefit from even more barriers. I know I would not enter If I saw that I had to complete other tasks before I could enter even more tasks. Art challenges are supposed to be a way to show off for everybody. Even if you haven't much of a portfolio, yet.

 

That's of course not a solution for getting more people to participate, but to keep a separate forum section "Competition/Challenges" alive instead.

I also think it needs to be better promoted on the forum, but only with this art challenge alone a separate section can not live. That's why I suggested to offer more competitions in different fields as well.

 

I didn't read all suggestions, but I agree with @NomadKing.

Also I'd like to add that it would help having more umm how do I put it, exciting/interesting/actiony themes. Like characters. But characters are quite a bit harder than the normal stuff. But I've seen great talent in these contests that made ordinary stuff look extraordinary, and this is a challenge, so I think they can handle it.

 

So.. new art challenge around?

 

Perhaps we get one in August? Since holidays are starting soon or have already started?

 

yea i hope there wil be a new one soon

 

It's really kind of sad. This whole month I would have had time to contribute, acutally.
Welp... timing and such.

 

i hope the next month will give a supaah challenge !! because 2 months no unity challenge .. kinda made me sad xD

 

Thomas is just playing hard to get.

 

Is this not happening anymore? Maybe we could start our own one? I don't know about prizes but it could be good just to do for fun.

 

Do it. I like seeing these kinds of stuff.

 

Hey Guys,

For anyone that's interested, created a new thread here for unofficial challenge:

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/unofficial-unity-community-art-challenge-sep-2015.351437/