Any idea when the judging is going to be completed and posted? (Or if it has, where can I find the results?)
Judging is currently in progress. Currently one judge has completed judging and the others have begun. Results will be released when all judges have completed all projects - there is no time frame for this.
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I’ll probably get most of the entries played through in a few weeks at the most, I’ve been getting very little free time recently so the process is a little slower than I’d like.
Hopefully all of you won’t be waiting on me! So far I’ve been liking the hacks!
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I have a question, is it against the rules to publicy release a different version that the one submitted to the judges?
The reason I’m asking is because I have kept working on my entry to make it better for the public release, and I want to know if I should hold that until the judging period is over, or is alright to release it to the public whenever I feel is ready?
Just to clarify the submitted version would also be made public, but it will have a disclaimer mentioning it is an version kept for historic porpouses.
Releasing an improved version is fine. You will still be judged based on your original submission.
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It’s been a while, but I finally had time to put together a post for my MARTH entry. (I got it in on time, just not out to the public)
So here’s my entry, Tactics of Taming.
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Any more updates on the judges’ progress? It’s been about a month since the last one.
Total progress is about two thirds done. One judge is done, I personally has a few entries left, the next is about halfway through, and the last is making progress.
I won’t speak for the other judges, but I personally hope to have completed my judging by the end of the month. Final results will be released when all entries are played by all judges - the target date for this is the end of June at the latest.
EDIT 29/05/23: I have completed judging.
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Thank you for your patience, everyone: I didn’t expect judging to take two and a half months. However, the final judge completed judging yesterday, and today I am happy to announce the final results for MARTH.
1st Closing Act 71/80
2nd Into Madness 60/80
3rd Project HBR: Lonely River 56/80
=4th Manaketes and Warps 55/80
=4th Blast from the Past 55/80
=4th Storge Gaiden 55/80
7th The Lady and the Princess 54/80
=8th The Breakout 53/80
=8th We Are Legion 53/80
10th Tactics of Taming 52/80
11th Trader Raiders 49/80
12th Where's Fado 45/80
=13th Rise of the Replacements 42/80
=13th Omori Emblem 42/80
=15th Cycle of the Heavens 39/80
=15th Nine Heroes 39/80
=17th The Random Vague Job 67 38/80
=17th Tower Defence 38/80
19th Rookie's Day 35/80
=20th Village Chapter 32/80
=20th Decadences 32/80
22nd Battlefield - Homecoming 29/80
=23rd Fighting for Freedom 28/80
=23rd Smash 'n Grab 28/80
25th (Untitled) 27/80
26th Port Phenire 19/80
D/Q The Traitor's Tale 28/80
D/Q Heir of Leonster 15/80
Congratulations to Closing Act, by Rivian! You have made a really terrific hack, and you have won MARTH! Into Madness by Rexacuse takes the silver medal, while Project HBR: Lonely River by BobbyAsaka claims bronze.
Unfortunately, The Traitor’s Tale and Heir of Leonster are disqualified as they kept crashing for several judges with little explanation, rendering them likely unwinnable.
Due to the sheer quantity of submissions, posting the feedback on FEU is not feasible. Instead, I have created a MARTH website which hosts the reviews and downloads. Each entry has a page, with all relevant reviews, scores, and links.
https://chalphycastle.ie/projects/make-a-really-terrific-hack-marth/
And now, for my closing statement.
I decided to host this contest as a perennial contestant of hacking contests. The last traditional, no-frills hacking contest was Ghast’s Make A Fun Chapter 4 in 2020. After that, subsequent hacking contests started to grow more restrictive - Make A Fun Chapter 5 in 2021 banned chapters lasting beyond 30 minutes, among other such restrictions. A typical FE chapter often lasts much longer than this. My disregard for these rules got me disqualified - but to be fair, the chapter wasn’t very good anyway and disregarding rules should get you disqualified.
I still continued entering the X-Hour Blitzes and the first Hack Jam, though I frequently ran overtime in the former and the timing limitations for the latter were unusual, though I kept within a definition of 48 hours. By the second Hack Jam, I intended to enter, but due to over-ambition I failed to finish my entry in time. That hack is now being repurposed.
I hadn’t felt the same interest and motivation in entering these contests with their tight time limits, so I decided that I should host a contest myself. I took my inspiration from MAFC as a whole, but many elements (such as having multiple judges) came from MAFC 2019. I aimed to learn lessons from the contests that came before.
When I first posted the MARTH thread, I expected that I would receive about five entries. Instead I received 28 entries, the most any hacking contest has ever had, breaking Box MAFC’s record of 22. Thank you to everyone who entered. I set out to create a simple contest, and this did better than I could have ever imagined. Thank you to my fellow judges as well: having multiple pairs of eyes on a chapter goes a long way to having a fairer score and to mitigating my personal biases.
Perhaps one day there may be a successor to MARTH, but it won’t be for a long time. If you have any questions about anything, feel free to ask. In the meantime, I hope to see you all around, perhaps in FEE3. Again, thank you to everyone.
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Congratulations to Rivian, Rexacuse, and Project HBR for their placements; as well as all applicants! I greatly enjoyed playing everyone’s public release, this contest was a fantastic way to get the community together. I’m entirely satisfied with my placement at 20th, and I’ll be sure to take the judges’ feedback to heart.
Thank you Darrman for hosting, and all the judges for their hard work! This contest was incredibly fun, and I’d love to do another one of them in the future.
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Hey thanks for hosting this event it was a fun time! I hope those who scored low can learn what they can improve on and can learn from the criticism given and those who scored highly can see what they did well and how people respond to it
If anyone wants further explanation on any score I had given them feel free to shoot me a DM!
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Thank you again, Darrman, for hosting this contest. I learned some hard lessons that I’ll have to keep in mind the next time I feel like submitting something to an event like this.
It’s kind of too late for me to address most of the gameplay issues with the Cycle of the Heavens MARTH Preview itself, but rest assured that the first proper CotH release will give you the option to pick between 1RN and 2RN when starting a new game. Hopefully that should fix up the hit rate issues reported by the judges.
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Oh results are here! Yay! 
I’m pretty happy with all the feedback from the judges, and I don’t have really anything to disagree with.
So thanks for holding this contest and taking the time to play all the games.
Now I have to stop being lazy and publish an update with that third act I promised lol.
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Yeah, I did about as terribly as I expected to. Ah well.
Not too bad for my first (publicly) released hack. Seems I have a bit more to learn in terms of map size and gameplay (And I did finish the hack in mere HOURS of the deadline so…), but it was a great event overall! Congrats to Rivian! And thanks for hosting this Darrman!
(And it seems to me most of the judges used the older patch of Smash 'N Grab that had the Weapon Rank bugs so yeah, wanted to throw that out there. Not the end of the world, but crud did it affect my score. I’ll have to give it its own stand alone release! With feedback taken into account!)
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Well, I guess the lesson to learn here is “throw SRPGStudio in the trash where it belongs.” I can at least attest to the fact that I saw zero crashes on my end, but… well. The fact that not one of the judges could finish my thing is so sad, it almost loops around to being funny.
Eh, it’s okay. I really doubt I would’ve scored too well anyway. What a waste of money SRPGStudio turned out to be, though…
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I have no idea what your project could’ve been doing that made it crash like this, but in any case what happened to you sounds more like the exception and not the rule when it comes to SRPGS projects.
It probably would’ve helped both of us for different reasons to share our projects around with non-contest participants before submission.
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Sorry to the judges for having to play my hack lol. I think I suffered from having too large of a scope since I started with one week left which left little time to playtest. Thanks to 2WB for writing out in detail everything which is very helpful.
I was going to say “that may be but I no longer trust SRPGStudio, I think I’ll stick to hacking going forward,” but then, my (so far, perhaps) only hacking project has received a ton of reports of the convoy glitching out and other bugs that I never experienced, nor understand what causes them.
…I think it’s just that I’m terrible at this lol
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