So that's my opinion.

I hadn't thought about deleting these posts until you brought it up. I agree they clutter things up. I think that's a great point. And they're not going to get much use now. They were for planning, and it's all planned.

I do have mixed feelings though. It was only a few days ago that I was back in the earlier competitions, reading lots of the posts. It was interesting to see things progress as we went from planning to competition to looking back.

And I think there's something to be said about letting latecomers see how we decided various things.

If there were a way for us to archive them with a button to view archive, that would be perfect, but we don't have that.

So since I'm on the fence, I'd love to get opinions from other people. Anybody else have any thoughts?

Oh and "while you're still excited about what you accomplished in the last one… :D" needless to say im NOT excited about what I accomplished in the last one. hehe.

Let's give ourselves four more days, up to the 22nd, to make any other comments or change requests to the current schedule (the 22nd of May to the 21st of June). That will still give us one month from the time we make it official until the competition starts.

In other words, if you feel the need to have it moved, now's the time to speak up!

After that we'll start coming up with theme ideas and post a sign up list.

I made my earlier decision based on the fact that I was usually done school for the year by the last week in April or the first week in May. All of the other colleges and universities in Utah were on a similar schedule. I made the false assumption that that was pretty standard across the US, but it clearly isn't.

We have few enough people at this point in the game that I'm perfectly OK changing the dates to accommodate some of the regular participants.

If one date or another (start of May vs. 22nd of May) is preferable to other people, now's a good time to speak up. I don't think we'll decide anything official for a few more weeks, but it's better to share your thoughts sooner, rather than accidentally forget to post them and have the decision get made without you.

Nice find by the way.

Also…

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Now that's a lot of parenthesis in a response! :D

Could be worth posting the next competition here, may get some more people interested in joining.

1) When should competition 5 be held and is May 1st - May 31 ( inclusive ) good?

I think that time frame is good. I can't guarantee that I'll be able to participate but I most likely will since I can always pull something small and more manageable. I think your reasoning for the time frame is also pretty sound for what it is. I probably wouldn't have even thought of school being out for many people :P.

2) Should we try something else instead of month-long competitions?

Honestly, I don't think we should. Maybe increase/decrease their frequency, but I think a month on a single focused project really is be the best idea. I know you said "you can make real games" in this time frame, but I think you meant we are able to "make higher quality games that aren't mini in scope and riddled with hacked up code" as you detailed later. Even in the month long competitions we have ( and I've only participated in two so I can't vouch for how others have went ) I end up scrapping my original project and working on another that ends up being submitted. Last time I was scrapping a networked game for a Pong clone, and this time I scrapped the zelda-esque game for a Slender-esque game.

I bring this up since that means even in the months time we are given I still somehow screw myself over one way or another. If the competitions were shortened or regular progress announcing was required, I'd probably be too nervous to aim anywhere outside a very small and well known skill zone for a project and wouldn't make the "half mistake, half reward" of aiming higher and getting more outside my comfort zone. Even though I agree it's crap to develop a project with lots of code and design only to scrap it and say "I've learned so much! Cut my losses and do something else…", I'm a hypocrite since that's exactly what I do with at least half my projects. For every one that sees a "that's done" at any point, there's at least two more 6 feet under or gathering dust.

So I think you're right that keeping it at a month time frame is a nice middle for keeping a reasonable time goal to make people stay on top of their project without also feeling stressed for time since there's much more of it that they can plan out with. Also sorry if I went on a bit there, just a bit down that I keep making a track record of doing that. I feel that if I go with a "bottom up" approach and let the design come naturally as features and obstacles present themselves where I can then tackle and compress them, the project will get done in segments and I won't be too stressed about everything "being designed to work together from the beginning". To quote an article I just read:

"Starting with the details and repeatedly compressing to arrive at the eventual architecture avoids all the pitfalls of trying to conceive the architecture ahead of time."

Which I think is what keeps me ( and possibly many others here ) from getting the best results they could have and also ending up not making the games they want to make due to freezing over design over-thinking it when they should be working on it.

3) "You know… I think I use more parentheses in my writing as a programmer than the typical non-programmer. Interestingly, all of my parenthesized stuff would probably be comments in code. (And leave it to an engineer to over-analyze something as trivial as parentheses.)"

This is true, I see you using parentheses quite a bit. I'm a bit guilty of that myself, but I'm mainly guilty of most of my sentences having at least one comma breaking it up. I forget what that is called since it has been a few years since my last English lesson but I know it's a nasty habit to get in lol.

OK, so you can probably breathe a sigh of relief and take a break for a few weeks before we get serious about the next competition, but I wanted to keep the ball rolling forward. Maybe I can trick some of you into signing up for the next one while you're still excited about what you accomplished in the last one… :D

So the obvious big question right now is for us to figure out when the next one should be.

We've sort of gotten into a pattern now of once every three or four months. I had thought it was every 3, but in reviewing the dates, our earlier competitions were mid-February to mid-March, mid-May to mid-June, November, and then February. That's closer to once every four months.

Anyway, I'm interested in hearing what other people might want.

I don't mean to try to convince anybody, or to suggest that this is official by any means, but I might suggest doing it in May, and tentatively planning on just doing it every third month. May seems like a pretty decent month for a lot of people. I know a lot of people here are college/university students, and May gets you out of school. (Well… southern hemisphere might be different, and so might high school.) On top of that, in the US (which I know not everybody is in) also gets the small added bonus of a Memorial Day vacation right at the end of the competition (which I know not everybody will be able to take advantage of).

At any rate, it seems like a good fit, and I do like the idea of moving into a more regular pattern, now that we've been doing this for a while and seem to be growing (slowly).

That would also give us the interesting coincidence of lining up exactly with the calendar month this time around: May 1 to May 31 inclusive. (Note: May 22 to June 21 is now also a proposed option, as discussed in the thread below.)

You know… I think I use more parentheses in my writing as a programmer than the typical non-programmer. Interestingly, all of my parenthesized stuff would probably be comments in code. (And leave it to an engineer to over-analyze something as trivial as parentheses.)

If you like those dates or would prefer other dates, please speak up. There's honestly few enough of us that we can be flexible and respond to individual needs.

I'm also open to exploring something besides a month-long competition, though I have to say I like that duration personally. It's long enough you can make real games, using good patterns and practices without having to cram it all into a single day or weekend. But at the same time, it's short enough that you feel time pressure from day 1, and you know it's not such a large commitment that you'll eventually return back to normal life. But if you want to try something else, speak up!