Ooooh well done to everyone who took part, and to Judge C for getting themselves in gear! Congrats especially to @AuraWolf for winning, so I’ll be YouTube streaming Calculation Manipulation on YouTube in two days’ time, I’m looking forward to it :>
The only time “LT jank” ever came up in reviews was for Costco, in the vein of “it would be 5/5 for presentation if the engine was smoother”. I kept the scores to whole numbers, but this has the problem of making the scores less granular and though I do maintain things feel that little bit off, it’s not 20% of the potential score off. I’ll keep things in mind for the future. For what it’s worth Costco still got 4/5 in presentation across the board, so nothing actually lost two points of presentation for using LT.
A Fire Emblem chapter has many different areas to focus on. Gameplay, presentation, and story are all important to make a good game. However, I believe that gameplay is the most important factor of them all, which is why it’s weighted twice as much as presentation and story.
You can write a masterpiece and the graphics can be stunning, but if the gameplay is boring, I’m not going to enjoy it. However, this doesn’t mean you can just ignore these things. Even if the level is well-designed, if the map itself has every tile cut off and the lord is an Eirika palette swap, that will take me out of the experience.
As for story, typos make for hard reading and they detract from the experience, hence why I marked entries down for them.
Ultimately, Fire Emblem is a game, and the most important factor in a game is the gameplay. The truly great games have good presentation and story as well, which these categories aim to encourage, but without gameplay, they’re all style without substance.
These I consider to be two seperate fields that have different skillsets. Telling a good story and drawing a good portrait require two different tools. In addition, game with good story and bad presentation exist, and vice versa. How would these be graded if merged? Rivian’s post addresses this point well.
There isn’t really much room to add extra columns on the front page table. Maybe another table below it with gameplay/presentation/story total columns would work?
For clarity, I did mean 2/20 points for the overall presentation, given both you and Levin cited being in LT as the only factor that kept it from a 5/5 score. Although yeah, definitely not a 20% point loss lol.
Not disputing this, plenty of people have complained about the “uncanny valley” of going from FEGBA to something almost FEGBA. But this is an issue outside of any LT users’ control.
Honestly I think this is the root of the problem. There’s this strange game both you and Levin play with the other 4/5 LT presentation scores, implying that if only had the dev only changed these few things, or put some more effort in certain areas, then a 5/5 would have been possible. It’s the worst of both worlds, contestants are lead to believe that engine choice is score neutral unless they put an absurd amounts of effort into presentation.
If FEGBA is the preferred engine, I’d just make that clear in the ruleset.
Like Spensir, I have complaints. For example, I didn’t win, which constitutes targeted hatred and harassment, and is evidence of corruption in the judging staff, presumably by the obvious mole, Judge C. (Clearly, Levin’s answers were fabricated, and the ass-gear based struggle was a cover story for the agenda of the Machiavellian FEU elite
My only complaint is that MF got anywhere near the top ten.
I mean… it was blackjack.
What were you judges thinking?
Congrats to the winners, I’m sure I’ll get around to playing games again eventually and see the coolness for myself lol
Thanks for creating this contest and putting your time into judging each entry.
Congrats to Aura Wolf for getting first place. I haven’t had the chance to play their hack yet, but after seeing the results, I will definitely give it a try.
Huge thanks to the judges for the feedback and the constructive criticism on my hack. Dark Cells was my very first hack, and making it was a big learning experience. I had to rush a lot of things due to the hard semester I was having, so there are a lot of aspects that I didn’t have time to improve on.
Congratulations to the winners! And thanks to the judges for going through and rating all the entries. Much appreciated to the feedback. It’s great to know what could be improved on, especially beyond the rushed mistakes (item sprites/debug items) and lack of story (focused harder on gameplay).
thats the power of puzon at work
Since I’ve started playing through the CELICA submissions on YouTube stream, and am planning to play through the rest of them, I suppose I’ll advertise my smol FEtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBm75zwpigtwOoLkmC8TCig
We’ve presently played Sigma’s Untitled Costco Project, AuraWolf’s winning entry Calculation Manipulation, and RandomWizard’s The Spellthieves, and I’m planning on playing Obni’s Dark Cells later today (June 13, 6PM UK time): https://www.youtube.com/live/8H0STTNGOqQ
I’ll make my own Topic as well, but if you’re interested, please do join! I’m planning to play through a minimum of one on stream per week (usually on Saturdays at 3PM UK time), in this order:
If you’re one of the submission creators and would like to be around in the stream chat for yours, please do let me know and if it’s possible, we’ll see if we can make it happen :>
I understand why MF is in the position it is, but man being played last is either a lot of pressure, or a great insult XD
And I’d love to pop in for the stream when you’re playing MF, and I’ll try to release another patch or two to make sure it’s running smoothly lol
Understanding that I am a fair bit late to the conversation, I do have to agree with @SirSpensir 's points on LT entries in regard to the contest here. Due to the fact that we have actually have a reasonable number LT entries, 6 I believe in this case, I think we could also possibly try having two branches of CELICA, one for FEB and one for Lex.
I do understand wanting to keep the two together in one, but it is realistically somewhat hard to measure two different engines in an actually unbiased manner. Sure in the case of this particular round of entries and judging, the few minor point losses due to engine jank wouldn’t have drastically changed the placings anyways, but whether or not this stays true in future could be doubtful.
In essentially any judging scenario, the fact that this came up at all in a review should normally invalidate that specific review entirely when a “less smooth” engine is allowed to run alongside something that may generally run better or very subjectively ‘feel’ better.
Of course I have no involvement as a participant or judge myself, but I do think it could be properly addressed in a few different ways. Maybe even just a poll to see if people want to let Lex / FEB entries to run only against themselves in seperate entry pools, to test the water.
And of course if anything came across as rude or misunderstood, it was entirely unintentional.
Hey. Don’t bother playing my entry.
I promise it isn’t a great insult I figured that the last one I should play on stream should be something I’d definitely be properly excited to stream. So uh… I guess that puts it more on the side of a lot of pressure
Nice nice! If you do, please do let me know and I’ll play the updated version (Discord is probably the best place to get in touch with me, given that I uh. Have taken six days to read and respond to this LMAO)
And @Ysor are you sure? Everyone’s gotta start somewhere, so I’m sure that it’s fine
Positive.
Okay, can do. While I’m sure that it is fine, the idea behind the stream series is to show off things that people are proud of and want more attention on, so that’s completely cool with me. Thanks for letting me know!