Does this mean we (the project/video submitters) get to make our own thumbnails?
The thing with foreign language presentations is that permitting them would require moderators that are fluent in that language.
And we couldnât search for them?
Maybe they could be some kind of
âspecialâ moderators who only have powers on their respective languaje.
Yeah, we can handle that case by case. I imagine this will be a small minority of projects.
That would be the goal - we should have assets and instructions so that project submitters can make their own thumbnails.
This might have been suggested before, but hereâs my recommendation: Everyone makes their own thumbnail, but is required to add a small FEE3/FEU graphic in a visible corner (which will be decided beforehand). This way, we both have custom thumbnails, but also a trademark of sorts, like the old thumbnails.
Iâd prefer having a template that we just plug a few of our own things into. Itâll make it easier for the less creative of us, and will give the event a unified look when it airs.
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I finally actually read this thread. I was pretty burnt out by FEE3 - the amount of lengthy content bombarded me. I probably spent more time reading the fee3 threads than actually watching the videos 
Firstly, thank you to Pandan & others who made this event work and for creating this documentation. It will be valuable.
However, I feel pretty strongly that fee3 is flawed as it is. While I do love community events here, Iâm not sure how much I really want to get involved with fee3. It sounds rather complex and daunting. Iâm amazed that you managed to take on so many responsibilities, Pandan.
That said, who knows what next year will bring. I might end up helping with some LP videos next time (but I wouldnât play anything that takes over 30 mins personally).
If we donât want to scale back by spreading some of the content over the year rather than all at once (eg. a project of the week type thing), then weâll continue to have an exorbitant amount of content.
One alternative to spreading out content is to be less inclusive - to arbitrarily decline or diminish projects that the committee doesnât really like. I donât like the sound of this, but politics of it aside, projects could be allotted an amount of time based on some credentials. For example, if youâre new, your video must be shorter. I think this would be difficult to organize in an equitable way, but it would still be better than having ~45 hours of video come out in 18 days (two and a half hours a day!).
Then, perhaps we should just have a stricter time limit on all submissions.
I would suggest that the creator must be able to complete their submitted chapter within 20 minutes. This way, the LPer should never exceed around 35 minutes, given that the creator might be able to clear it quicker.
Want to submit a longer chapter? You can, as long as you personally take the LPer footage and edit it down to 35 minutes or less. We shouldnât edit videos for people.
Finally, I also feel that we could probably spread it out over a month instead of 2 and a half weeks. Maybe every 8 hours instead? 8 am, 4 pm, and midnight?
Best of luck to everybody who takes on fee3 for next year.
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Maybe just split FEE3 in half, so one during the first half of the year and one during the latter half. Maybe one during Summer and one during Winter.
I sort of said this in the FEE3 thread, but I donât see why FEE3 has to be a perpetual continuum of LPs. Making FEE3 one month long or splitting it into two separate instances sort of skirts the problem: there is an overabundance of content, making the event difficult to digest for many people (heck, and difficult to organize for volunteers).
I wonât repeat my lengthy post in entirety, but I feel FEE3 would be more consumable and more fun if it was more like an actual event, rather than a series of LPs.
I said a lot of this in the other thread, but I think policing what gets submitted will only create more administrative overhead with little gain. Additionally, I am confident that no one involved in organizing has capacity to do this more than once per year. While Iâve considered the idea in the past, I donât think we would stand to benefit much from splitting up the show unless we completely re-define the event. Additionally, I have not seen any suggestions come with detailed plans that would outline how we would implement these changes. Iâm all for improving the event, but I am also intensely aware of our resourcing at present and am working within those restraints.
The rules for submission need to be egalitarian and easy to understand. Too many rules will only serve to dissuade people from joining in, which is counter to the inclusivity of the event, which is one of its greatest strengths and reflective of who we are as a community.
FEE3 is a digital convention. You canât expect every person to go to every table at a tradeshow or conference. We shouldnât expect people to watch every video - thereâs too much content for that. I think 1 hour as a hard upper limit with recommendation to go shorter is fine, but I think instituting limits based on format or tenure will only cause more confusion and inequity across projects.
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I shared this with the organizers earlier, but I wonât be able to involve myself in fee3 this year. Have some personal life changes coming up over the summer that will impact my availability.
Knowing that we want to make improvements to the event, I want to share this early to help kickstart planning, operations, and committee building.
Fee3 is dope and Iâd like to see it continue and improve this year. I hope the documentation is helpful and I hope you consider lending your time to support the event when the time comes. Itâll be here before we know it.
Thanks all.
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Can anyone explain me how an FEE3 works?
Itâs an FE fanggame/hackrom showcase where the community produces its own videos, LPs, trailers, etc. to highlight what theyâve been working on for the past year. The communityâs done this for 10 years. You can find all of the prior FEE3âs on youtube.
EDIT: @Areynor here are all the existing playlists
Runa you can thank me for that.
Also, for those who are looking to pre-game with old FEE3, these should be the past 9 years of playlists. The only one I couldnât find was 2012. Anyone know what happened? This one 2012 playlist alludes to lost videos?
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Thx, when is the last day to submit a project?
Under âSample Timelineâ
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Cam or whoever is leading organization this year will announce it when the time comes. Ideally this will follow the timeline J treecko called out.
This thread houses documentation so that whoever facilitates the event knows what to do and how to run it
Updated w/ 2021 playtest. Thanks again to WarPath for organizing.
Hoping someone steps up to run FEE3 2022 
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I added links to the post-event discussion threads in the 3rd post. I was reviewing WarPathâs 2021 write-up and the thread here and wanted to summarize some of the key recommendations and actions for 2022 for whomever organizes next year and future years.
Last yearâs discussion of areas of opportunity included 1) organizational/administrative burden and 2) audience. This post highlights insights from this discussion and proposes recommendations to help guide both operational and strategic goals for FEE3 in 2022 and beyond.
1) Organizational/administrative burden
The past two years have been noteworthy for the high degree of effort and onus placed on a lead organizer and a small group of volunteers. This lead to staff turnover, with both myself and WarPath explicitly stating we would not ârunâ the event in future years. Last year, we created volunteer committees to help run the event. While this helped ensure the event ran on time, it did not decrease the workload of the organizer as contributions across the committees were uneven and the organizer was responsible for managing each group.
Given that FEU and FEE3 continue to grow year over year, we need to ensure the event can scale with it. To do this in the fairest way possible, we recommend making the event self-service.
This means there will not be a formal LP volunteer committee or art committee that are managed by the organizer. Instead, we will encourage those interested in supporting the event in this capacity to support on an ad hoc basis as requests arise. Their names will be available on the thread with contact info as appropriate.
All graphic assets and recording recommendations will be available in guides and can be easily viewed so project creators can self-serve and create their own thumbnails and videos for submission. Volunteers can be contacted directly by project creators via the forum or discord for support as needed.
To facilitate this, I recommend we create public channels in addition to a thread on mainsite.
- #fee3-general (for general discussion/qâs)
- #fee3-help (for recording tips, connecting with LPers and volunteers, as well as thumbnail support)
Both of these should be available in the discord for people to get help for video recording and thumbnail creation, with all resources and recommendations pinned. This will allow volunteers to commit only to projects that they wish to support and reduce organizational overhead. Thus, the onus is on the project creator to get a showcase made vs. FEU. This means FEU is the âplatformâ to host projects in the event, vs. the person running the event - a nuanced, but key difference.
By doing this, the organizer(s) will only be responsible for managing submissions, scheduling, quality control, and video uploads. By removing the responsibility of ensuring all videos submitted to volunteers are recorded and have thumbnails, the burden on the organizer(s) should decrease substantially. The artefacts shared in the first post will help facilitate this. (@CT075 - I may need to make some edits in the first post to adjust whatâs there so itâs more easily usable based on what we learned this past year)
While it goes against the spirit of inclusivity to not provide âfull-serviceâ to all members in the community, the unfortunate reality is that there is no way to continue operating at this scale with the same degree of support as previous years. Therefore, we encourage project creators to learn how to record themselves or forge connections in the community by asking volunteers to record for them.
We hope by doing this, it will elevate the quality of presentations as well, since creators and LPers will be able to discuss and chat ahead of time, while also reducing the likelihood of an LPer feeling obligated to record a project that they do not want to.
2) Audience
There were discussions around the audience and how we can continue to grow the event. Part of this is also centered around the goals of the event and who the target audience is. I wrote up a description of how I see the total addressable audience for FEE3 and believe the event is best served by creating content in whichever format the project creator thinks is most suitable to showcase their project (LP, dev interview, trailer, etc.) and that we continue to engage r/FE, Serenes Forest, larger FETubers, and other channels to promote the event as is.
This is juxtaposed with changing how the event is structured to reach the broadest audience, as our marketing efforts and interest from those channels has historically been low.
In short, FEE3 is very much âby hackers, for hackersâ and we should aim to continue making the event fun, easy, and enjoyable for both hack creating and hack playing audience to view and participate in as possible, while working with other FE groups to promote the event to reach new audiences that may be interested in hacking and hacks, but have not yet joined FEU or arenât aware of the work we do here. According to Cam, the site traffic does increase both during and after FEE3, so there is organic growth and interest. Subscriptions on the FEU channel continue to rise as well even with our minimal promotional efforts. If we can do a better job of promoting the event as is, I predict we can meet some desired audience goals without drastically restructuring the event or reducing the number of participants.
This summary is not meant to be definitive, but to capture the spirit of the discussion from last year and propose key operational and strategic changes to facilitate the event in 2022. The community will continue to listen to feedback and adjust the event as needed.
Thanks all.
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Updated the OP with latest changes and recommendations from the last year. Also added the 2022 playlist to the 2nd post.
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