Game On C

[watermydoing14]

Does anyone have an idea of how complex the games should be? An hour seems awfully short to create anything super complicated that is also fully functional/nice looking.

Bumping this. It seems impossible to create a complex game with several sprites in less than an hour.

The goal is to make it more complex than the games that other teams create. It will all be very dependent on what competition you're at and what teams are participating. So make it as complex as you can/try to get as many points as possible according to the rubric as you can in the time you're given. If I were an event supervisor (which I'm not, so take this with a grain of salt), I might not give anyone full points for the complexity category on the rubric if I don't see any games that are decently complex, but I would realize that only a certain level of complexity would be possible to achieve in 50 minutes, and would want to give people credit for what they were able to do rather than take points off for what they weren't able to do.

[Showow]

On the official rubric that's on the National website, does anyone have any elaboration for part m. Game Balance-level of difficulty It's worth 4 points, so does that mean if the game is very difficult to play 4 points are awarded, or does the range of difficulty found in the game worth 4 points.

[watermydoing14]

On the official rubric that's on the National website, does anyone have any elaboration for part m. Game Balance-level of difficulty It's worth 4 points, so does that mean if the game is very difficult to play 4 points are awarded, or does the range of difficulty found in the game worth 4 points.

My interpretation of that category is that you would get full points for an appropriate difficulty - not too hard and not too easy. I'm sure it would vary depending on the supervisor though.

[zent]

How have you conducted practice tests on your teams? I don't see any suggestions in the wiki exchange. Does the coach just give some themes and parameters? Any suggestions are appreciated.

Thanks
Shannon

[Skink]

I've had the (dis)pleasure of having supervised this event in a tournament context now, so I wanted to write about the experience. Please know that I last wrote about this event last spring here before it was in rotation and largely stand by my thoughts there.

Nearly all of the Inquiry & Nature category events need work, but this event makes both myself as well as competitors extremely nervous. Technology-related impediments aside, it all returns to how the event was designed and how it is scored. As it stands, there are quite a few peculiarities to the scoring rubric worth noting. First, like with Exp Design's rubric, point values are needlessly doubled from what they could be opening up avenues for extra subjectivity (which is best minimized). That aside, some more objective parts of the rubric are poor. Sound presence is far too heavily weighed. All prepared teams will include sounds (and their own or creative use of instruments if they seek full credit), but, for those that didn't bother learning straight from the rubric (and this is many of the top teams in Illinois--especially AA division ones--after my experience), an easy, say, 5pt goes to a team that includes any sound, not even if its inclusion is, at all, appropriate. I had one team that played an obnoxious ping nonstop. They earned an easy 5pt there for just doing it and my saying that it was present but with poor execution. A team that includes original sounds and employs them well could earn seven to eight points. Even if the game is sloppily written, plays averagely, and barely addresses the scientific topic of the day, this is enough to get ahead. That should not be. Rating of play balance and overall impression is absurd, too. Professional critics are hard to reach consensus, and here I am sending my team off into the abyss hoping that their event supervisor's ideas of what constitutes an original, appropriately operable game somewhat align with mine.

The most interesting bit of the rules is the science topic. I loosely interpreted the bit in section 2. about event supervisors providing a broad topic to mean chapter titles. Take texts from major categories of science, and copy the table of contents. To me, that lists a good set of broad science topics (after you cut out things like biotech, acid-base equilibria, and geologic time...no thank you). Anything more specific (friction, ionization, predation) is no longer broad and open to much game designer creativity, and anything broader (cells, chemical reactions, density) nearly defeats the purpose of having a topic at all. The topic I ended up choosing was cellular membranes and transport. It was broad enough to involve a wide array of (interesting!) game options while still providing focus. Now, that wasn't the loose part of my interpretation here. I gave participants a single-sided summary sheet about the topic in case they learned about it a long time ago and forgot or in case they've never studied it. I cannot assume other event supervisors will do this for my team later down the road, and that makes me nervous because this event is not assessing whether participants know a little bit about everything (hello, Five Star/TPS/Pic This). At any rate, even with information to ensure that the science topic was adhered to, I have never seen biology so butchered*. In the end, I did get a few impressive games in terms of the science but not nearly as many as I'd hoped. The science was shallow, and part of that was that participants do not have the time to design and build a good game, let alone one that addresses the topic in any way that's not completely cosmetic.
*Chemistry gets butchered regularly by participants in B division. If I have to hear about "H-C-eye" one more time...

Some technology difficulty was had for a few teams, but I suspect operator error for one of them, as they froze Scratch on two different computers within a short timeframe.

Anyway, this is the point where I dredge out my two wishes from that last post. On-site builds have merit, but 50min is not enough time for the demands of this event for the vast majority of participants. Sure, a scoring distribution will be had, but it's not a meaningful competition as-is; it's really shallow. I'd almost rather there be a limited amount of topics selected for the year for this or that level of competition. Teams pre-build their, say, four games (putting in as much or as little time as they feel they need, which goes for any building event) on the listed scientific principles attempting to build a game that adequately addresses the topic while including all of the necessary components of the game per the rules (you would be amazed how many teams did not have a UC sprite). These are brought in, and 1-2 are scored per supervisor choice released on the day of the competition post-impound. Something like that would accomplish the goals of the event better.

After awards, I was approached by a young man who looked distraught that he didn't win. He nicely asked me how he could have improved his game for next time. While I won't divulge the actual advice I gave him, what I was really thinking was 'You needed four more hours.'. I'm really at the point of "Game Off" on this game-off, and the sad part is that I may have to supervise it one more time this season.

In the interest of full disclosure, I did receive two games that I rather liked (the top scorer in each division). The top scoring game was the first place in junior varsity, where they gave me an osmosis maze where the cell tries to avoid lysing. The science was sounder than, well, everyone else (because osmosis is easy to model!), and the game played great. I was impressed and didn't get the chance to communicate that to the team. Noting that, even they could have done much better as far as the rubric was concerned.

[ellipticalTalk]

As someone who recently participated in this event at the MIT invitational, I am looking for ways to improve upon my performance. To any who may have supervised this event, how do you interpret the portion of the rubric that says "Scoring explained"?. Our game was a spin-off of 'Jetpack Joyride', (with the theme of "Mechanical Springs") and we included a portion in the introductory page where we said, "The longer you stay alive, the higher your score!". This was implemented in the game with a simple counter that would increment the score and display it for every 1 second that the character remained alive. However, we received 0 points on this section on our rubric. There were certainly some other deductions that I did not fully comprehend, but this was one of the more blatant ones. Does anyone have access to a "1st place" game that they'd be willing to share? We placed in the top 10 for this event at MIT but felt we could have done better. Thanks in advance!

[Skink]

Unless they made it themselves, supervisors are unlikely to share any games for legal reasons. It's the same thing as disclosing answer sheets. As for the scoring explained criterion, I'm afraid you already understand it. In what depth do you 'explain'? I cannot say. I'd have given two points for it based on your description, and I'm a tough scorer. It depends on whom your supervisor is and, possibly, whom the competition is. Some supervisors score per their own standard, and others score you on a curve against your on-site competition. I wouldn't fault yourself or the supervisor here; it's the nature of the scoring rubric.

[engelsna]

Hi, At a recent event we had an issue where our microphone/headset didn't work. It worked on all Windows machines we tried outside of the event. I think the issue was that the computer security was at a high level so when the headset was plugged in, the team could not instruct the machine to "accept" the new device (headset). As a result, we couldn't record our own sound and points were deducted accordingly. I'm wondering if there is a way to take out the technical element so teams are not penalized because of their technology. Ideally, the event would be scored on how well the game meets the objective and not on the quality of technology each team brings. Are there any ideas for solving this? Could uniform headsets be provided for all at the event so they will for sure work? Thanks.

[ThatRoboGuy]

Hi everyone, I figured my input would be useful to many here. Competed in the Case Regionals competition against some very strong teams yesterday (Solon, Mentor, etc.) and came out on top in Game on, 1st place. They were kind enough to give us back our game, so I hosted it on Scratch so it could help out others looking for examples.
https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/98619372/#fullscreen
No modifications have been made since the end of the competition. Something to keep in mind are that EVERYONE has to deal with the limited time constraints. Don't expect 1st place to be the next Undertale.

[Skink]

Could uniform headsets be provided for all at the event so they will for sure work? Thanks.

This places an extra burden on event supervisors while not actually eliminating the problem at hand. Anyway, what did the ES do when you informed him or her of this problem?