Hello,
The next CodinGame contest (Spring Challenge) has just been announced. It’s created entirely by the CodinGame team and is not a sponsored contest. It marks a change in the way we organize contests.
Unleash The Geek in multi
I think the Amadeus project team would like to release the game as a sponsored multi but no decision has been taken yet. I’ll notify you if I have any news.
I personally hope it will be released in the next few weeks. Meanwhile, I’m sure everyone can enjoy a break for now; the week has been crazy!
Community Contests
In September 2017, we started the development of the sdk as we were working on the first community game: Mean Max. Two years and 10 community contests later, we’ve decided to stop organizing these contests.
Creating such games, with almost no tools at first, in collaboration with community members has been quite a nice and challenging journey. Julien and I have enjoyed helping creators transform their ideas into contests and I must say we were impressed by their involvement. Thanks to them, we tested a lot of things: 3-players games (MM), crazy games like MOBAs & card games (BotG, LoC&M), collaboration games (CalM)…
Even if we were getting better contest after contest, we tended to run into the same issues:
- Managing the contest calendar. Creating a contest is a long process. To be able to announce a next contest at the end of the current one, we needed to be sure about the prototype, the theme, the creators availability… Concretely, we had to start helping the creators on the next contest before finishing the current one. If we had a prototype by that time.
- Working together. Time zones sometimes made it hard. And, when time zones were not an issue, communication was still difficult as we were working during the day at work and creators were working on their free time. Add to that our different expectations as CodinGame employees vs CodinGame fans… We tried as much as possible to respect the creators’ wishes in terms of game design but sometimes, we had to disagree and force a decision. Even if it was for the good of the community in the end (and part of the initial agreement), it felt weird.
- Losing time. Between the sdk support, the rules discussions, the viewer optimization, the writing of statements, etc… helping creators usually took more time than creating a game ourselves. (And it’s normal)
Now, we would like to pause a bit and spend some time focusing on improvements of the CodinGame platform that we have been unable to tackle this year.
I’d like to thank again all the creators of community contests:
@Agade @Magus @pb4 @reCurse @AntiSquid @Illedan @Wildum @csj @mcargille @harshch000 @JohnnyYuge @nmahoude @eulerscheZahl @aCat @radekmie @chimney42 @Iuliia @rnkey @Tzupy @Matteh @Azkellas @Tehelka @java_coffee_cup
I’ll do my best to help you promote community initiatives like Bit Runner 2048 but we won’t be able to provide more support.
CodinGame Contests
We plan to host two CodinGame contests per year. We’ll create the game and there will be no sponsor. We are working on some ideas to provide a new remarkable and memorable experience. I’ll tell you more in December.
On top of that, we want to host more public sponsored contests (like UTG with Amadeus). For now, we don’t have anything in the plans; I’ll keep you updated!
(also, bonus on the XP gain…)