Competition Length Discussion

Competition Length Discussion

rbwhitaker 16 Feb 2016 03:33

I know the last competition just ended, but it's time to start thinking about the next competition.

In this thread, I'd like to discuss the length of the competition.

Our competitions have typically been 31 days—four weeks plus an extra weekend. So that length is obviously a strong candidate.

The last competition we did (Competition #7) was a six week competition, partially because Christmas was going to be really busy for some, but a whole lot of free time for others. So the six week competition was sort of a compromise. The team I was on failed to really capitalize on the extra two weeks, but we were kept busy with life and it probably wouldn't have made much of a difference if it was 4 weeks, 6 weeks, or two years. I'd love to hear what people who actually got some stuff done thought and felt about the extra two weeks.

There has also been talk in the past about doing a significantly longer challenge, since I think all of us have struggled to complete a game, end-to-end, in the 4 week time period. (Though I suspect that's more of a failure to pick the right scope for the game. At least it is for me.) One number that has been thrown out as a possibility is 100 days.

What do people think of these lengths? Any other lengths of time that people want to put down for consideration?

I'll create another thread for discussing *when* to do the competition, but for now, I'd say we're still probably at least a month out from the next one, if not two.

Re: Competition Length Discussion

PiscesMike 16 Feb 2016 03:38

I'm going ahead and throwing my vote in for a 100 day challenge. Scope is something important, and I've been known to want to cram waaaaay too much stuff into smaller time frames. I'd also assume we'll get started sooner (one month away) rather than later if we do the 100 day version.

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"May the mercy of His Divine Shadow fall upon you." - Stanley H. Tweedle, Security Guard class IV, The League of 20,000 planets

Re: Competition Length Discussion

Marcus42 16 Feb 2016 05:10

A 4 week competition is, of course, something that I'm always open to. A 6 week competition I'm also very open to, mainly because I really only used 2 weeks in the last competition, so I don't really feel like I know what this time frame would be like. A 100 day competition … Wow, that's quite a while.

I do think that scope is important to consider when talking about competition lengths. My biggest reservation about the 100 day competition is that it encourages selecting a project with a larger scope, which isn't exactly something I've been hurting to do anyway and sort of feel that I should avoid for a bit. However, there's a lot of potential in a significantly longer competition, and we've been discussing something like this (although maybe not to quite this extent) for a while now. Hmm.

I'm going to go ahead and vote for the 100 day challenge as well. If it works, great, and if not, then we'll know that for the next competition. Win-win, I say!

Re: Competition Length Discussion

rbwhitaker 17 Feb 2016 03:30

I definitely agree with your analysis of scope with the 100-day thing. I think I'll manage to carve out too much scope, whether it's a 1-day thing, a 30-day thing, or a 100-day thing. I can say from past experience that when I did a 100 day challenge, I still didn't get my game done.

100 days is also a long time to get sidetracked or interrupted. I mean, I've had that happen in (I think) every single competition that I've been in here. I work hard on it for a while, then something comes up and I end up more or less dropping the game. It's mostly about determination and building a habit of working on game dev every day, but I have to admit, I have failed at this repeatedly.

On the other hand, we've also talked about doing multiple things in parallel. That is, we maybe have a weekend-long competition, a 31 day competition, and a 100-day competition that all start on the same day. If you get tired of your game after a single weekend, no big deal. Just do the weekend-long competition. If you can keep going, then proceed to the month-long competition. And if by then, you've built up a habit, 100 days is probably not that long after all.

I guess I'm mostly just agreeing with you here in saying that I think 100 days is quite a while. I don't think going longer will actually fix the scope problems many of us have. That needs to be addressed as a separate issue. But if we do a 100-day competition, I'm less inclined to start up another month-long competition while that one is still running. Doing a 100-day competition more or less sets up the cadence for software development for us. We can't fit 4 competitions into a single year anymore (probably). But 3 100-day competitions with 65/3 =21 days = 3 weeks of breaks in between seems fairly reasonable to me. (And of course, it's not like we'd have to do only 100-day competitions. We could do 1, then do 3 31-day competitions in between before tackling another 100 day one.)

I'm mostly undecided still. But I like the comments so far.

Re: Competition Length Discussion

Brett208 18 Feb 2016 22:48

Hey everyone,

I lean towards the shorter length competitions. It is too difficult to stay focused for 100 days on your own. That being said, I don't have any plans for this competition, so my vote doesn't really count.

Another idea. If we want to go for 100 day competitions, I think it would be cool to build in sprints/cycles/progress reports (or some other term). Maybe make 7 cycles at 2 weeks each which would make 98 days. Everyone joining the competition would be expected to post at a minimum at the end of each 2 weeks, say every other Monday and discuss the progress they made on their 2 week goal and what their next 2 week goal will be. This would encourage people not going long times without posting and encourage keeping them on track with smaller goals within the 100 day cycle. The last 2 days in the cycle could be split into 1 admin day each at the front and back. The front admin day to lay out the overall goal/one sheet. The back end admin day to make final preps on post competition game builds or You Tube videos. I also like the idea that if I log on every other Tuesday, I can check and see how everyone's projects are going since it is a lot of fun to see the different projects grow!

Actually though, I'm really posting to ask about plans for another collaboration before this competition starts (or maybe during it if we are tying to start layering activities). I should have the time in the coming weeks to participate. I'm now living in Eastern Standard Time (UTC -5). My family and I will probably be moving a large distance again before this year is out, but in the short term I'll be available.

Re: Competition Length Discussion

Marcus42 19 Feb 2016 00:18

I'll leave it to RB or PiscesMike to answer you regarding the collaboration (because I am typically not as involved in it as they are and would be fine whether we do another one soon or not), but I like your idea of a two week sprint cycle. Although it would be nice if there were more updates than just one every two weeks, having that as a minimum goal and the idea of having a specific focus each sprint sounds like it would work very well! And, of course, people could only do several of the sprints if they didn't want to do the full 100 days.

Good ideas!

Re: Competition Length Discussion

PiscesMike 19 Feb 2016 00:57

Sounds like we've got some good ideas floating around already! I do like the idea of 'mandatory' updates. This is something I was doing heavily in the beginning, and I've noticed that the projects where I let that slip are the ones where I usually don't get finished. At any rate, it's a good indicator of where you are in the project and allows you to set realistic goals going forward. So, I definitely favor that idea!

Ah, the Collaboration. That's something we haven't discussed in great detail recently. For me, the collabs are a little more difficult since the work schedule conflicts with the weekend. In the past, we've been doing a Saturday or Sunday. Sadly for me, I work a 5pm-5am shift Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. When we did the last one (Asteroids3D) we had talked about it for a good bit, decided and finalized a date well in advance, and I was able to take that day off. If we could pull that off again (and we've got plenty of time), I'm all for another one!

Even if that doesn't work out, I can probably try to get rest early when I get home Friday night and get up 'early' on Saturday and maybe join about half way through.

So, great ideas guys! Keep up the good work!

-PiscesMike

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"May the mercy of His Divine Shadow fall upon you." - Stanley H. Tweedle, Security Guard class IV, The League of 20,000 planets

Re: Competition Length Discussion

rbwhitaker 19 Feb 2016 14:21

I also like the idea of mandatory updates. While it's not like we can actually force anybody to make an update, we can put that into the official rules and then let people be rebels if they choose.

When I did a 100-day game before, I tried to organize it into 1-week sprints and tried to put out a new update of the code every week, even if I hadn't made much progress. That kind of fell apart for me towards the end. I didn't really make it the full 100 days. But it helped for the majority of the time.

Quite honestly, if we're on regular sprints, then people can decide each sprint if they're in or out for the next sprint. That might make it so that if somebody only wants to do 1 month, they can sign up for the first couple of sprints and then be done after that. Or if somebody wants to do the full 100 days, but knows that they're really busy or on vacation for a week or two in the middle, they can just basically take a "pass" and rejoin when the next sprint is starting, without feeling like they're doing anything wrong.

I'm liking the idea of 100 days, but I'll admit, the one thing that has me the most nervous here is that I've never actually made it 31 days, let alone 100 days.

I've said it before: my problem seems to be that I bite off more than I can reasonably do, and when I get to a point where I know I can't publish the game by the end, I lose my motivation. I have two potential solutions to that. On one hand, if I just pick something small in scope (something I think I can do in a couple of weeks) then I should be more than safe with 100 days, even if there's scope creep. If I get done early, I can start another game, knowing I've already finished one. Or option #2 would be to just assume that I'm not going to get it done. Then I don't pin my hopes on getting something published. A big part of these competitions is about getting ourselves into the habit of making time during busy lives to get some game development in. Publishing games is a great side effect of that, but not really the true goal of the competitions. Now I'm just monologuing, so I'll stop. At least for now.