With Competition #4 winding down, it's time to start thinking about Competition #5!
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!