Icon/Model/Spell Team Contest - Results[+100 REP]

[IcemanBo]

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DREAM TEAM - Goblin Artist

Total Model Icons Spell Model: 48/50 - 40% Icon: 90/100 - 30% Spell: 35/40 - 30% 48/50 An excellent model! A very nice mesh and texture that fits very well with in-game models. Effects and ‚fluff‘ of the model are suiting. Texture is very nice, but the tone is a bit too bright. The on-model effects are suiting, but the model only reaches full potential with the added special effects. Mesh 10/10 Animations 10/10 Texture 9/10 Concept 10/10 Effects 4/5 Mechanics 5/5 Blizzard style Is the style similar to standard icons? 10/10 Concept How qualitative is the concept, how unexpected and creative is the idea? Originality and uniqueness of icons are judged. How fitting are icons for model/spell? 20/25 Technical note Quality of: color, composition, expressiveness, shape, definition, sharpness, clarity, shading, realism, proportions, rendering, details, materials. 60/65 Final score: 90/100 Final Comments: The blizzard style presented in these icons is very unique and designed perfectly. It does have that blizzard vibe towards them. The avatar icon itself works nicely with the model and how everything works in its favor. Each icon has nice vibrant colors and they all are high contrast in quality and detail. The concept given creates a creative idea with bright colors and the paint pallet that the goblin uses. Everything fits the model greatly as a artist who uses said brush, pallet, and multiple colored paints. The quality and sharpness of these artworks work nice with the overall model and spells, giving them all together a fitting hero and or unit. This is an absolute atrocity. GUI should be banned from contests. I actually loathe that you made me read every line of the code. I promise never to review GUI code spells again after this contest. Slightly more concretely, my problem with this is: it's basically spagetti. There is poor architectural control flow/code documentation. How will you maintain this in two years time? It's very expansive. You have cyclomatic complexity of 4+ in some places You mix [Custom Script] with GUI quite a lot. Are you on some kind of crusade to make this easy to use for GUI users? Code composition is pretty weak in some places. I consider LadyHive entry to be a slightly healthier GUI spell in the context of composition. Two-way dependencies and global state are basically just rotten. The argument that "GUI uses globals" doesn't mean you can't use globals in a composable way. In other words: you know how to program - use your programing knowledge to maximise maintainability of your spell - those best practices extend to GUI, C, machine code, or even verilog. (1) Namespace or otherwise segregate data ownership in some logical way, (2) have a single direction of data access and ownership, and (3) lower level code must have higher level documentation - there's a reason why C programmers always write big doc-style comments. They're needed here too. Coding: 20, 16, 18, 13, 15, 15, 18 Average: 16.43 Score: 16 / 20 Concept: 17, 17 Average: 17 Score: 9 / 10 Visuals: 18 20 20 Average: 19.33 Score: 10 / 10 Overall: 35 / 40

Zul'Alman was judt an Inside Job - Troll Pariah

Total Model Icons Spell Model: 48/50 - 40% Icon: 86/100 - 30% Spell: 27/40 - 30% 48/50 A trusty, yet somehow interative concept with excellent execution and a very crisp feel. The overall look of the model fits perfectly and looks very nice. Mesh 10/10 Animations 10/10 Texture 10/10 Concept 8/10 Effects 5/5 Mechanics 5/5 Blizzard style Is the style similar to standard icons? 8/10 Concept How qualitative is the concept, how unexpected and creative is the idea? Originality and uniqueness of icons are judged. How fitting are icons for model/spell? 18/25 Technical note Quality of: color, composition, expressiveness, shape, definition, sharpness, clarity, shading, realism, proportions, rendering, details, materials. 60/65 Final score: 86/100 Final Comments: The style given here is pretty nice, a unique type of style that represents the hero or said unit. The icons match up with what the model or unit does and how it reacts when in battle. The style doesn't scream blizzard to me, it has kind of a new age of blizzard style which isn't bad by any means, they still produce a highly attractive icon. The model made matches with the 3 icons given, the icon "Grim Rupture" is nicely made but doesn't really make much sense when looking at it. On the left side of the icon is hard to make out and is kinda random, it could maybe be defined a bit more. The quality and definition of the icons presented are really well executed and they have a very nice high render. This was a pleasure to review - I read all the code in about 5 minutes, then spent about half an hour investigating various questions I had come up with. The implementation is interesting and even ingenious. I had a few wtf moments which could have been avoided with some nice comments, but overall I can't complain. Sadly, some of the implementation details make configuration and behavior a bit limited, but in any case I liked the simplicity. Visually I would liked to see less mismatch between effects and game behavior. I think it's relatively clear that the ability is causing the fear to occur, but less clear what causes the damage/spawn. Composing the spellcaster's action with the death + totem spawn visually could earn you more points here. Coding: 11, 16, 16, 9, 5, 12, 16 Average: 12.14 Score: 12 Concept: 16, 16 Average: 16 Score: 8 Visuals: 12, 12, 15 Average: 13 Score: 7 Overall: 27 / 40

JustAZbound - Fabricator Tank

Total Model Icons Spell Model: 41/50 - 40% Icon: 66/100 - 30% Spell: 31/40 - 30% 41/50 A great idea and good execution of the concept. The mesh feels a bit cluttered, but the wrapping covers most of it. There are some minor flaws with the mechanical (event objects for instance) aspect with the model. Mesh 8/10 Animations 9/10 Texture 8/10 Concept 9/10 Effects 4/5 Mechanics 3/5 Blizzard style Is the style similar to standard icons? 6/10 Concept How qualitative is the concept, how unexpected and creative is the idea? Originality and uniqueness of icons are judged. How fitting are icons for model/spell? 15/25 Technical note Quality of: color, composition, expressiveness, shape, definition, sharpness, clarity, shading, realism, proportions, rendering, details, materials. 45/65 Final score: 66/100 Final Comments: The style given represents a panda type character that has a cigar or pipe in on icon and in the other has a rage type facial feature. The ability icon that has the arrow present is very confusing and needs to be more defined in some areas, the figure at the bottom right is very hard to make out. The icons made i believe doesn't really go with the whole concept of the tank model, because the icons are pandas and not tank type icons, which is what the model represents. I would of liked to see more tank type icons for ability's instead of a panda, i understand General Frank likes pandas but overall id like to see more tank type icons to fit the model. The avatar icon is well made and well executed but again, i would like too see more tank type icons instead of a panda, i honestly don't really see how the panda matches up with the tank. Or, have the panda avatar and the other 2 ability's just be tank type ones. I like what you've done here by creating a spell API and then a demo of it. It reminds me of C code, for example the linux kernel. API: I think your data ownership story is a bit awkward, and using this API feels like it focuses more on performance than user experience. I would really encourage you not to do that. I think a better API would expose more powerful event pub/sub tools and less implementation details. On the whole though, this is pretty good with respect to vJass. Documentation: Your API level documentation was a bit painful to read with static/non-static methods written in a different style. Inline code documentation frequently lacking Visual effects: You really ought to have demonstrated how your API could provide cool visual effects, imo. floating text is pretty weak in this case. it's overprescribed and it under-delivers. Coding: 18, 16, 18, 14, 16, 20, 15 Average: 16.71 Score: 17 / 20 Concept: 15, 17 Average: 16 Score: 8 / 10 Visuals: 11, 11, 17 Average: 13.0 Score: 6 / 10 Overall: 31 / 40

Alliance - Lady Hive

Total Model Icons Spell Model: 43/50 - 40% Icon: 57/100 - 30% Spell: 30/40 - 30% 43/50 A very nice adaptation of a Lich and a sorceress, but with a very unique feeling. Animations and effects really convey the feel of the model, but are a litte bit wooden. As the mesh is somewhat adapted from other parts, this seems a bit ‚unisipired‘. Mesh 9/10 Animations 8/10 Texture 8/10 Concept 9/10 Effects 5/5 Mechanics 4/5 Blizzard style Is the style similar to standard icons? 5/10 Concept How qualitative is the concept, how unexpected and creative is the idea? Originality and uniqueness of icons are judged. How fitting are icons for model/spell? 14/25 Technical note Quality of: color, composition, expressiveness, shape, definition, sharpness, clarity, shading, realism, proportions, rendering, details, materials. 38/65 Final score: 57/100 Final Comments: The overall blizzard connection with these 3 icons is not too heavy, the avatar icon could use some touch ups such as the eye lids could be more feminine looking. The makeup around the eyes could be more of a brighter solid contrast instead of making it seem like the eyes are glowing. The hair itself looks decent and it has texture of what hair looks like. The problem I'm getting with the 2 ability icons is that both are a swooping attack with brushes, it would be nice if there was something different like a paint pallet being thrown at an enemy or maybe she uses her brush to pierce the back of an enemy dealing damage.. Lastly, I would of liked to see more usage of ability's and give more uniqueness towards the unit. Overall this is a good submission and was easy to review. Your use of libraries is expert and you've raised lower levels of abstraction well. It's relatively easy to learn how events flow through the code. Modifying this to do something more would be fairly easy for a new author. I really dislike that you used a hashtable instance directly instead of using a Table resource. There's a fair bit of magic numbers without documentation, but that hasn't cost you any points. Actually, documentation in general is surprisingly weak - there aren't really any code comments at all, and self-documenting code is fairly average. There are a few mistakes but not what I would call game-behavior bugs - for example, I consider it a problem that spawned units are always owned by neutral hostile. One way to design around this would be to make the spawned units untargetable. Using neutral-hostile and allowing them to take damage was a weird design choice. You had a huge opportunity to do something nicely with Missile behavior, but instead it's just uniform random, which cost you some configurability points. One alternative would be to have missile vectors a function of the caster's relative position - a good opportunity to impress visually. Concept could be easily used in funmaps, but not really suitable for ladder or competitive games. Good composition is where most of your points here come from. Tooltip was fine but a bit noisy and I dislike your use of the word "origin" which isn't quite right. Coding: 19, 19, 18, 9, 11, 18, 13 Average: 15.29 Score: 15 / 20 Concept: 10, 13 Average: 11.5 Score: 6 / 10 Visuals: 18, 20, 15 Average: 17.67 Score: 9 / 10 Overall: 30 / 40

Scourge - Fel Spider

Total Model Icons Spell Model: 31/50 - 40% Icon: 59/100 - 30% Spell: 32/40 - 30% 31/50 Not an original mesh and minor adapted animations. The texture choice and unwrap is fitting though. Effects increase the spooky, creepy feeling. Other than that it is a moderately well-made model-edit, but not original work. Mesh 5/10 Animations 5/10 Texture 7/10 Concept 7/10 Effects 3/5 Mechanics 4/5 Blizzard style Is the style similar to standard icons? 7/10 Concept How qualitative is the concept, how unexpected and creative is the idea? Originality and uniqueness of icons are judged. How fitting are icons for model/spell? 17/25 Technical note Quality of: color, composition, expressiveness, shape, definition, sharpness, clarity, shading, realism, proportions, rendering, details, materials. 35/65 Final score: 59/100 Final Comments: To start off the avatar icon looks really nice, it takes a little bit too actually tell what it is but overall it is well executed and shows how deadly the spider is. Lets get into the ability's, so the hatchery icon looks alright, the color scheme chosen isn't as appealing too the eye. If the avatar icon is a blood red and the spider is blood red then I would assume the "Hatchery" or spider lings would also be red but in the icon it appears green. I would of liked to see the egg too be maybe a greens color but then a babe spider popping out that's a reddish color and around the egg have webs holding it in place. The ravage icon seems a bit confusing too me, it looks nice overall but I don't really understand how this particular icon goes with the spider model. Going over the color scheme again, I don't feel like it really matches up nor does it look like a spider ability, it seems like a ability for a mage or monk. My general impresion is that this spell is overengineered to the Nth degree, with loads of questionable features used, crazy data and resource management, and some strange nomenclature. How did you even get this to behave correctly - code-gen?? Yes, DATA Is pretty gross. Magic numbers. Magic numbers everywhere. Comments are pretty useless. Spaggettii on your maps sweater already. But overall it works rather nicely. You should source code review, because some of this is gross. Visually I would have been happy if the spiders didn't bunch up or could have some behavior other than wandering around in a configurable way. Conceptually I would have been more happy if the nydus subspell didn't feel tacked on/awkward. Given the short cast range and timed life, it felt a bit awkward to me. In my opinion a cooler subspell would have been for example: (1) call spiders (spiders in nearby nests protect/surround owner, not the nest), (2) feast (consumes spiders in the target area, gaining health and mana), or (3) berzerk (attack and movement speed is increased for 5 seconds, depending how far away the nearest nest is). I'll leave as an exercise to the reader to think about why the nydus component is an anti-patern. Coding: 18, 17, 20, 12, 11, 18, 18 Average: 16.28 Score: 16 Concept: 18, 18 Average: 18 Score: 9 Visuals: 13, 16, 12 Average: 13.67 Score: 7 Overall: 32 / 40

Best tem 10/10 - Moose General

Total Model Icons Spell Model: 16/50 - 40% Icon: 38/100 - 30% Spell: 23/40 - 30% 16/50 Well, this a very messy model, even with a rather neat concept. The mesh, the unwrap especially and animations are very poor and there are many flaws with the technical aspects of the model like event objects and the orientation of the model. Mesh 3/10 Animations 3/10 Texture 3/10 Concept 5/10 Effects 1/5 Mechanics 1/5 Blizzard style Is the style similar to standard icons? 3/10 Concept How qualitative is the concept, how unexpected and creative is the idea? Originality and uniqueness of icons are judged. How fitting are icons for model/spell? 15/25 Technical note Quality of: color, composition, expressiveness, shape, definition, sharpness, clarity, shading, realism, proportions, rendering, details, materials. 20/65 Final score: 38/100 Final Comments: obviously Ralle is the best! But, I'm gonna judge this professionally. So, I do enjoy the ability icon of the moose charging forward with its antlers, that is very unique and creative in my mind so good job there. It only, could use some touches in some places but other than that it looks pretty good. The icon with the red and yellow lights on the moose's ears has a weird shape towards it. The chin area has a weird shape to it looking like an extra chin or something else. The red and yellow lights are a nice touch, not sure if they are replacing the eyes of the moose or not. The antlers in the background of the head seem to be too small, instead make them a little bigger, some would be out of the frame of the border but it will make it seem like a portrait head shot of the moose. The overall head shape needs some work and adjusting. Looking at the avatar icon, It looks nice but i feel like the background could just be black and then around the moose could be a team color glow coming off him or something like that. Overall I had a hard time reviewing all of this. There's just so much code and the signal-to-noise ratio is exhausting. My main suggestion is to improve your comment quality. Get feedback and focus on this. Notes: some leaks - can easily make stack trace with some exploratory testing. there is even some commented out resource management code... some resource management feels a bit fragile even if it looks correct. You can improve this by keeping your functions small and simplifying resource management as much as possible. I shouldn't have to scroll up and down to see where a dynamic resource is fetched/freed. no configuration for damageTarget impl is sad, given how much work you put into making everything configurable very, very verbose comments, mostly of the form "now do this". Say why, not what. Here's an excellent example of why not to use magic numbers: //issued order id not equal to "undefense" (582056) if c.contains and c.sp == SpellPhase.Channel and GetIssuedOrderId() != 852056 I think the concept was a bit simplistic - it's more the theme/jokes that are nice here. Visual effects a bit basic and default config is a bit crazy. 5x knockback multiplier...? Coding: 16, 8, 18, 0, 19, 15, 18 Average: 13.43 Score: 12 / 20 Concept: 13, 13 Average: 13 Score: 6 / 10 Visuals: 5, 11, 11 Average: 9 Score: 5 / 10 Overall: 23 / 40

CHAMPIONS - Dark Paladin

Total Model Icons Spell Model: 35/50 - 40% Icon: 75/100 - 30% Spell: 27/40 - 30% 35/50 Great custom mesh, but with a bit too many details for in-game notice. Nicely adapted animations but are too badly adapted to the ‚heavy‘ mesh. Texture choice are fitting, but are too cluttered to be full effect. Particle effects are suiting, but there should be a bit more variation in colour tone. Mechanical aspects are taken over from the Paladin, with really nothing to new. Mesh 8/10 Animations 6/10 Texture 7/10 Concept 7/10 Effects 4/5 Mechanics 3/5 Blizzard style Is the style similar to standard icons? 7/10 Concept How qualitative is the concept, how unexpected and creative is the idea? Originality and uniqueness of icons are judged. How fitting are icons for model/spell? 18/25 Technical note Quality of: color, composition, expressiveness, shape, definition, sharpness, clarity, shading, realism, proportions, rendering, details, materials. 50/65 Final score: 75/100 Final Comments: Looking over these icons they are very vibrant and have a nice color pallet. Lets start off with the avatar icon, it has a nice executed shape towards everything. It also shows off how the model feels, making it overall look like he means business! The highlights and lighting is perfectly placed and is placed well. Both ability's look like they are the same in a way, both are the same hue and seem to be taking over a body and draining its soul. I would of liked to see another type of ability made for this model instead of having 2 of a "soul draining" type ability. You could of possibly made a book type spell/ability because the model is caring a book, or since the model is caring a weapon, have the weapon being swung or being powered up for a massive ultimate spell. I like this spell, and I've spent more time thinking about it than I initially thought I would. In general my opinion is that you've done some things much better than average, and other things just okay. The design is solid, and you've done nice things with configuration. Kudos. There's one small bug I found wher your 30% hp isn't actually comparing by percentage (it's comparing by 30 hp exactly) The only thing holding this back from being a Great spell is careful composition of effects. Let me explain by starting more concretely: When you start casting, the damage occurs immediately, but it isn't until after 1-2 seconds that the effect appears When most of the effect appears, the low-hp units are almost dead. When the unit dies the hero immedaitely begins attacking, but the effect persists for another 2-3 seconds. There are two approaches to dealing with this: using a better model (possibly a custom one) for the effect doing fancy stuff with script to mold the model to your requirements. So if I were you, to make a visually excellent ability, I'd do something like this (barring just editing the effect!) Use units as dummies to get more careful control over effects Add another phase of the chaneling before damage begins to occur Make the damage phase align with the brunt of the effect payload When damage stops, dissipate the effect quicker by moving/removing the effect-hosts (unit dummies) And while you're at it... If you add complexity to the spell like conditional bonus damage, you'll want some visual effect to help clarify that A second effect model can be great for hiding/smoothing composition issues So, this all came a bit overprescriptive. In general, you didn't need to do anything super complicated to improve here. Small things make a big difference too. Coding: 15, 19, 20, 12, 16, 20, 14 Average: 16.57 Score: 16 / 20 Concept: 13, 16 Average: 14.5 Score: 7 / 10 Visuals: 2, 10, 12 Average: 8.0 Score: 4 / 10 Overall: 27 / 40

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Contest | Poll | Mini Contest

 

[IcemanBo]

We got 3 sections combined, and had lastly 7 full contest submissions (some even dropped off) ... it's a really great contest after all.

Congratulations to all of you for creating the heroes, though in the end DREAM TEAM with @Mr.Goblin , @Direfury and @KILLCIDE won the judgement, and also the poll! Good job.

How ever, in the results table you can see a "Malus" column. Let us explain.

• Team JustAzBound received a 7.5 points malus for a 3 days delayed submission.
• Team Scourge received a 15 points malus for ignoring the three member-team rule, and avoided any discussion for solving the issue during the whole contest.

The decission is especially a pity for team JustAzBound, as it costed the third place. But also for you to know, the amount of malus was not designed to change any ranks on purpose.

Afterall a big thanks to @Murlocologist for overall huge support, to @Cokemonkey11 @The Panda and @General Frank for judging, and @Wareditor for images.

Have a look at attached file, it's Cokemonkey's original coding reviews which also contain some extra information in regards of his working shema.

EDIT:

If anyone of you won't receive the appropriate contest reward within next week, please PM me. Same goes to judges, of course.

 

[Kyrbi0]

Woot! 2nd place! Congrats everyone!

 

[Wareditor]

Congratulations to all the participants for making such amazing entries!
Thank you @IcemanBo , @Murlocologist , @Cokemonkey11 , @The Panda and @General Frank for making this a success!

 

[Spellbound]

Congratz to the winners!

 

[PrinceYaser]

Woah, nice! Congratz to everyone!

 

[Warseeker]

Congratulations!

 

[IcemanBo]

All your submissions in sections should be opened again. Almost forgot. : )

 

[Daffa]

ALMOST GOT THE FREAKING THIRD!

Missed that by a long shot. It hurts

 

[Championfighter25]

Congratulations to the winners and the other participants.

 

[KILLCIDE]

Im a little confused with how I got 35/40 after reading what seemed like a rant list by @Cokemonkey11. Even more confused with the tone I get from reading your review and how I even scored "Good quality" or above on all the coding categories. It would be great to get more specifics on the issues with the code. Im not a programmer by any means, so the lingo is far beyond me.

There is poor architectural control flow/code documentation. How will you maintain this in two years time?

Youre going to have to explain what you mean by the former, but are we reading the same code? I actually thought I put too much documentation (even going as far as explaining why I use natives to enum units in an area vs using the gui function).

You have cyclomatic complexity of 4+ in some places

Not sure what this refers to. An example would be great.

You mix [Custom Script] with GUI quite a lot. Are you on some kind of crusade to make this easy to use for GUI users?

A few reasons, none of which relate to the last sentence. It was a combination of the systems I was using not being GUI friendly & me losing some points in previous contests for using "leaky" GUI functions instead of the native.

Code composition is pretty weak in some places. I consider LadyHive entry to be a slightly healthier GUI spell in the context of composition

Not sure what this means.

Two-way dependencies and global state are basically just rotten. The argument that "GUI uses globals" doesn't mean you can't use globals in a composable way. In other words: you know how to program - use your programing knowledge to maximise maintainability of your spell - those best practices extend to GUI, C, machine code, or even verilog.

Well theres one nice comment although, I dont know what "two way dependencies" and "global states" are and why they would be rotten.

 

[Misha]

Wait.. I won something?

 

[Mr.Goblin]

Wait.. I won something?

my face will always be there with you from now on... mouhahahaha

Also I like to point out, I have a tiny Mr.Goblin under my MrGoblin avatar, NO HIVERS HAS GONE THIS FAR!!! My life is finally complete XD

Ps: thanks for the judges must has been a pain to judge all these sudmissions! :O Also gratz to everyone who was part of this. I'd like to thank my team as well, we did a fucking great job guys... what a combo!

 

[Misha]

my face will always be there with you from now on... mouhahahaha

Also I like to point out, I have a tiny Mr.Goblin under my MrGoblin avatar, NO HIVERS HAS GONE THIS FAR!!! My life is finally complete XD

Ps: thanks for the judges must has been a pain to judge all these sudmissions! :O Also gratz to everyone who was part of this. I'd like to thank my team as well, we did a fucking great job guys... what a combo!

Hive hat-trick much? :b

well all i can say that it was fun i just didn't expect anything in particular

 

[MyPad]

Taken from the judgment of the code:

My general impresion is that this spell is overengineered to the Nth degree, with loads of questionable features used, crazy data and resource management, and some strangenomenclature. How did you even get this to behave correctly - code-gen?

I had no idea the spell was that complex to the user and judges. I made it nearly unreadable on purpose, as a form of protection for unwitting users, without considering the judges. Still, I take that as a complement...

EDIT:
I only jasshelper at my disposal, so I didn't use code-gen.

 

[Panda]

Congrats to everyone was a fun one! more to come!

 

[Hantoo]

Wait i win something?

 

[Chaosy]

Scored higher than I thought.. though I scored a 9 in one code section which is really unexpected by my own standard.
But then I looked what it came from.. documentation.

Fair enough, I am guilty as charged there. I heavily dislike writing documentation.
I admit that it is very useful to others, I just find it boring

 

[RED BARON]

Yea! The score is out and damn nice to read the judgment. We scored a lot higher than I had imagined. As to for the icons themselves I am glad to see how much work I put into them was spotted, even if my time to polish them was utterly lacking. The background for the avatar is quite detailed (I don't know why), but that is utterly impossible to see on the outcome. I will likely fix them up quite a lot now that submissions is open again (though perhaps first in a month or so, as RL is quite busy at the moment).

Thanks a lot for all the hard work judges and every participant. It was fun to test and try them and ti lead to some truyl great moments and fun in chat when discussing and researching the topic. A great contest.

Fair enough, I am guilty as charged there. I heavily dislike writing documentation.
I admit that it is very useful to others, I just find it boring

Its also useful for yourself if looking back at old code. I always write a ton of comments just to ensure I know later why I made what I did.

 

[Moy]

Congratulations! Especially to my teammates @PROXY and @Kyrbi0 Job well done.

Wow, 18 pt difference that is very big and far. Now we will have @Mr.Goblins face below our profiles and soon hive's logo will become his face.

Looking forward to what's next at the Arena forum.

 

[Exarch]

Gratz to all !

 

[Kyrbi0]

Now that I've had a chance to cool down, I can respond. First off, thanks to our Hosts (IcemanBo & Murlocologist) as well as our hard-working Judges (Cokemonkey11, The Panda, & General Frank) for making this successful Contest happen!

@Cokemonkey11

This was a pleasure to review - I read all the code in about 5 minutes, then spent about half an hour investigating various questions I had come up with.

Ha! Glad to be of service. *tips hat*

The implementation is interesting and even ingenious. I had a few wtf moments which could have been avoided with some nice comments, but overall I can't complain.

Coming from you, I consider that high praise indeed. I'm glad to have impressed.

It's been a while, I don't remember what I did in terms of commenting... Were there even any comments, lol?

Sadly, some of the implementation details make configuration and behavior a bit limited, but in any case I liked the simplicity.

Definitely the trade-off. Looking back, if I wasn't so dead-set on the "dudes running away thing" (which, surprise surprise, didn't actually work almost at all), I should have just gone with a modified "Cyclone Aura" from the Tornado (afflicted enemies ended up rooted more often than not anyway). Then I would've had even less lines of code! ; )

Visually I would liked to see less mismatch between effects and game behavior. I think it's relatively clear that the ability is causing the fear to occur, but less clear what causes the damage/spawn. Composing the spellcaster's action with the death + totem spawn visually could earn you more points here.

Yeaaaah... This was a real problem I had with it. I really kinda mis-mashed a bunch of concepts together, and try though I might it still kinda shows. Thanks.

Looking at your document, I was struck by a few things:
- There were bugs?
- How could I have improved in the Performance category? I'm not sure I'd claim perfection, but using what amounts to standard OE abilities with a few lines of code doesn't leave much room for 'bad performance', does it?
- "Spell clearly not possible without scripts"? LOL. You are too kind. I literally, trivially combined existing OE capabilities into a single ability. I mean that was exactly what I did. But thank you? : )
- "Suitable for spell submission"? Again, a bit of lol; spells like this one (like all the ones I make) are perfect examples (IMO) of "stuff you shouldn't upload to the spell section". I only did it because the Contest required it, and I'm kinda ashamed about it, honestly. How so?
- Re: the Tooltip... Was it simply too much? I was afraid about that; I put my best wordsmithing into making it meaningful yet succinct, but I figured (as aforementioned, the 'design bloat') there was simply too much going on for one tooltip to reasonably explain.

~~~

Anyway, thanks again for the Judging! As a pseudo-GUI/OE hackjob "Coder", I really didn't feel ostracized or downgraded for my choice of tools. Molto béne!

 

[Chaosy]

Also, for the record would be great to see similar things in the future. I think the team thing makes it way more interesting.

 

[RED BARON]

Also, for the record would be great to see similar things in the future. I think the team thing makes it way more interesting.

Yea, and it helps with motivating each other. (Although in the same vain, when future team contests are held, perhaps avoid running them at the same time as a major holiday event, as that part made coordination somewhat troubled).

 

[Direfury]

More time should also be allowed for teambuilding. If you get a bad teammate, and you weren't aware of your incompatibility, it'll sink the both of you.

 

[Kyrbi0]

More time should also be allowed for teambuilding. If you get a bad teammate, and you weren't aware of your incompatibility, it'll sink the both of you.

Give us a concrete suggestion. How long did we have in *this* Contest for "team-building", and how much more do you think would be necessary?

 

[Chaosy]

Honestly, I feel like it was more than enough.
If are a long time member you probably know a guy or two that you do get along with so preventing joining someone you absolutely hate is pretty small.
And even if it does happen, so what? it takes 1-2 days to create a submission at most. True I did not go with something insanely complicated for my spell, but point is that it is not a huge time investment. I could easily make 10 spell entries in a given contest if I had the motivation.

Maybe models/icons are crazy time consuming, not my area of expertise. So my bad in that case.

 

[Kyrbi0]

I think it all stems from communication, good or bad. No matter who you team up with, you got to exercise invaluable skills in communication to make it work.

Have a frank, straightforward discussion, right from the very outset; set out expectations, goals and desires. Figure out the nitty-gritty; time zones, preferred methods of communication (pm, discord, email, etc), when you're awake/modding/etc.

Honestly you should even talk about how to talk about things; who's going to take charge, who's going to suggest ideas, who's going to critique, etc. That's meta but it's important too.

 

[Chaosy]

We never did that. We just worked standalone with some discussion over hive PMs.
We gave some feedback, but we had no influence from each other.

I decided on my spell, Misha decided on the model. Hayate did the icons once he got visual references of the final products.

The one thing we actually talked about was who we wanted to portray.

 

[KILLCIDE]

Direfury, Mr.Goblin, and I were in CONSTANT communication with each other. We had discussions on how the model and icon should look, agreed / disagreed on spell concepts, and posted WIPs and gave suggestions. The only time we didn't talk was when Mr.Goblin was out of town, but even then, Direfury and I still bounced ideas off each other for the entry.

 

[Kyrbi0]

We never did that. We just worked standalone with some discussion over hive PMs.
We gave some feedback, but we had no influence from each other.

I decided on my spell, Misha decided on the model. Hayate did the icons once he got visual references of the final products.

The one thing we actually talked about was who we wanted to portray.

Well, if it worked, then it worked. It sounds like there weren't too many contentious personalities. So that's good.

Direfury, Mr.Goblin, and I were in CONSTANT communication with each other. We had discussions on how the model and icon should look, agreed / disagreed on spell concepts, and posted WIPs and gave suggestions. The only time we didn't talk was when Mr.Goblin was out of town, but even then, Direfury and I still bounced ideas off each other for the entry.

Great! I'm sure it was a big help.

 

[Chaosy]

At any rate it shows that insane complications not required, I am not saying it is optimal. But if constant communication is not fun for you, it is not needed for a decent submission.

 

[Kyrbi0]

At any rate it shows that insane complications not required, I am not saying it is optimal. But if constant communication is not fun for you, it is not needed for a decent submission.

Sure... I wasn't saying anything 'insane' like CONSTANTLY STALK EACH OTHER'S PUBLIC FEEDS TO DETECT ANY SIGNS OF LIFE. ; ) But good communication (which includes listening & silence as well as all the talking stuff I mentioned above) can make anything, any relationship, better. It can take a bad relationship & make it good, or a good relationship & make it better.

Once again, I'm glad you found something that works for you.

 

[Chaosy]

My intention was not to sell our 'superior' tactic, just pointing out that a longer deadline is not needed to enter.

 

[Cokemonkey11]

There were a couple of requests for comments in this thread about about my comments on coding/judgment criteria.

I consider it my responsibility to respond to some reasonable number of requests but I can't start a dialog with each and every subcomment, and I don't think this thread is necessarily the best place for it. With that in mind, can I suggest you guys (KILLCIDE and kybr1o):

* send me a PM requesting a comment regarding the judgment
* decide at what level we should be discussing (do you fundamentally disagree with all my judgment/hate everything I wrote? Or do a few of my comments stand out as concerning/interesting?)
* If it's the latter, pick 2-3 topics you think will have the most value discussing. Value can mean: clarifies the most, might be the biggest misunderstanding, has learning points for the whole community, might be the source of a bad score, etc.
* Ask pointed questions that I can respond to and keep the SNR high
* Make a note about how public you'd like our conversation to be. If I find it worthwhile, are you happy for me to write a blog/tutorial about our learning outcomes? If it turns out I made a mistake, are you happy for me to announce that in this thread?

Thanks! And sorry for the annoying process. It really is because "I can't answer everything"

 

[Brambleclaw]

HOW LONG UNTIL DREAM TEAM MAKE A SPLATOON MOD?
!!!!

 

[PROXY]

Kongratz boys and girls, this contest was much fun and I'm so hyped that we got so many participants. Much love to the judges too. You de best <3

 

[Kyrbi0]

There were a couple of requests for comments in this thread about about my comments on coding/judgment criteria.

I consider it my responsibility to respond to some reasonable number of requests but I can't start a dialog with each and every subcomment, and I don't think this thread is necessarily the best place for it. With that in mind, can I suggest you guys (KILLCIDE and kybr1o):

* send me a PM requesting a comment regarding the judgment
* decide at what level we should be discussing (do you fundamentally disagree with all my judgment/hate everything I wrote? Or do a few of my comments stand out as concerning/interesting?)
* If it's the latter, pick 2-3 topics you think will have the most value discussing. Value can mean: clarifies the most, might be the biggest misunderstanding, has learning points for the whole community, might be the source of a bad score, etc.
* Ask pointed questions that I can respond to and keep the SNR high
* Make a note about how public you'd like our conversation to be. If I find it worthwhile, are you happy for me to write a blog/tutorial about our learning outcomes? If it turns out I made a mistake, are you happy for me to announce that in this thread?

Thanks! And sorry for the annoying process. It really is because "I can't answer everything"

(What is "SNR"?)

For once I don't actually mind what you are requesting, and will probably do so (in part because I didn't have much to say). However, to the bolded section: I'm mostly just gonna point out that in the history of never has that been a thing. i.e. Nearly every Contest 'results' thread was filled with that very thing; contestants & Judges hashing out differences, in-thread. Why do you feel this situation is any different?

The public nature of the discussion is a part of it... Heck, even if no one responds, being able to publicly voice my thoughts on the Judging is invaluable to me as a Contestant. The only reason I'd consider PMing the Judges instead is if I, oh I dunno, have put off responding for 1 calendar year & the thread is closed... *cough*. Just as a hypothetical example. >_>

 

[Chaosy]

On the other hand..
I have never seen a contestant given a higher score after arguing with the judge, so what's the point?
Questions and such are obviously fine.

 

[Kyrbi0]

On the other hand..
I have never seen a contestant given a higher score after arguing with the judge, so what's the point?
Questions and such are obviously fine.

Just because it's never happened (and are you sure about that?), doesn't mean it won't.

Also, I try my best not to 'argue' with the Judges; I'm not here for heated existential debates or to cause contention; I wanna better understand the Judging, and hopefully clarify anything that the Judge might have misunderstood, especially if it affected my score.

 

[IcemanBo]

I wanna better understand the Judging, and hopefully clarify anything that the Judge might have misunderstood, especially if it affected my score

I also agree this thread can serve for such things very well. If PM is prefered, it can be used, too, of course, but else it's probably mostly better to have just a short public and open talk.

 

[IcemanBo]

@ all teams,

would you be interested in a Mini Contest outside arena, with the goal to complete the hero with extra abilities, and maybe improving model/icon/skin what ever? So it gets a complete hero, setting the goal more on overall completeness/synergy than focusing mostly in coding- or other categories.

 

[Chaosy]

Sounds fun.

 

[RED BARON]

would you be interested in a Mini Contest outside arena, with the goal to complete the hero with extra abilities, and maybe improving model/icon/skin what ever? So it gets a complete hero, setting the goal more on overall completeness/synergy than focusing mostly in coding- or other categories.

That does sound rather fun and matches something I had planned to do anyway, although I won't have any time for it the next month or so. Can't speak for the rest of my team.

 

[Kyrbi0]

@ all teams,

would you be interested in a Mini Contest outside arena, with the goal to complete the hero with extra abilities, and maybe improving model/icon/skin what ever? So it gets a complete hero, setting the goal more on overall completeness/synergy than focusing mostly in coding- or other categories.

Ha! Most definitely!

I'll take "prophetic insight" for 300, Trebek. ; P

 

[KILLCIDE]

@ all teams,

would you be interested in a Mini Contest outside arena, with the goal to complete the hero with extra abilities, and maybe improving model/icon/skin what ever? So it gets a complete hero, setting the goal more on overall completeness/synergy than focusing mostly in coding- or other categories.

@Direfury @Mr.Goblin CALL THE BANNERS!

 

[Mr.Goblin]

@Direfury @Mr.Goblin CALL THE BANNERS!

Guess I could rework the bucket icons, and add some shading to the texture.

 

[KILLCIDE]

@IcemanBo so will we only be judged on concept, synergy, and completeness?

 

[Cokemonkey11]

(What is "SNR"?)

Signal-to-noise ratio. As in, there's too much small (or irrelevant) stuff, and not enough important stuff for me to fairly and comfortably respond to these asks efficiently.

For once I don't actually mind what you are requesting, and will probably do so (in part because I didn't have much to say). However, to the bolded section: I'm mostly just gonna point out that in the history of never has that been a thing. i.e. Nearly every Contest 'results' thread was filled with that very thing; contestants & Judges hashing out differences, in-thread. Why do you feel this situation is any different?

The public nature of the discussion is a part of it... Heck, even if no one responds, being able to publicly voice my thoughts on the Judging is invaluable to me as a Contestant. The only reason I'd consider PMing the Judges instead is if I, oh I dunno, have put off responding for 1 calendar year & the thread is closed... *cough*. Just as a hypothetical example. >_>

Because I think in other contests people have (in addition to hashing out discussions), also been ignored, and I don't like ignoring people - so I'm telling you how you can actually get info out of me (even if it comes off a bit standoffish)

On the other hand..
I have never seen a contestant given a higher score after arguing with the judge, so what's the point?
Questions and such are obviously fine.

FWIW I'm not particularly against changes to someones score, but it would have to be approved by the contest host etc, in the event that we agreed there was some mistake.

 

[IcemanBo]

Check out [MINI CONTEST] Hive Member.