Publishing hurts, at least for contests

So, word from the Ion Award competition at SaltCON now is that they've thrown Diggity out of the contest because it's published.  Which seems kind of off to me, although I guess it's a gray area.

The contest literature says the contest is for unpublished games.  The eligibility rules, however, say only this in that regard:

2. The game cannot be under consideration by any company at the time of submission or judging. 

That's definitely the case for my game. Nobody's looking at it, and I'd have happily licensed it to any of the publishers at the conference. Their problem is that I've got it up for sale at TheGameCrafter.com and listed on my site here. However, I've only sold six copies through TGC, and it hardly seems like that's the same as a commercial print run or "publication" in any accepted sense of the word. I can't imagine they'd care if somebody had come up with a game design, had some printed up, and sold them out of a suitcase at conventions - that's basically no different than what I've done, and actually more aggressive marketing and investment than I've done.

Apparently a sticking point for them was that my rules say that the game is "published by Plankton Games." I guess that was a dumb move on my part, but it seems kind of arbitrary that those four words of text on a document are definitive. The reality remains the same - I have no print run and no company looking over the game yet, and the judges at the competition are representatives of big companies looking for good new games to print and distribute, which mine potentially is, or it wouldn't have made it through the first few rounds.

Hippodice has a much more workable rule for these situations in their competition - they say the game can't have more than 100 copies created. That allows some space for people to create and distribute small print runs while still ensuring that the competitions will be populated by game designers rather than established games from bigger companies.

Very disappointing. To the organizers of competitions, I'd say consider the new reality of print-on-demand and web distribution by individual designers, allow for the fact that these micro-publishing efforts don't somehow make a game "published" in any traditional sense, and whatever your call, make your guidelines very clear on this point. To other designers, I'd say that if you're interested in entering your game in competitions, you should probably not put your game up on a POD site unless you're sure the competitions you want to enter allow for it.

Upcoming stuff

It got quiet around here towards the end of the year as my semester ended and we traveled to see family.  Then the new semester began with a fury.  So, I haven't been posting much, but I do have some good news to report:

• The new artwork for Diggity is complete as of late last year, and it's neat-o.  I'll put up some samples soon.  I ordered some copies from TheGameCrafter.com after tweaking my art uploads. Their printing is always pretty dark (they prefer the term "rich") relative to how the images look on the screen, so I had to lighten it after getting one made up to test it.
• Diggity was selected as a finalist for the Ion Award at SaltCON, a boardgaming convention in Utah. I tried hard to find a way to get out there for the convention, but it ended up being too hard to get away from teaching and my committee work for those days (plus it would have ended up costing me about $700 - not impossible, but pretty expensive).  The competition organizers are willing to demo Diggity for me, so I've got a copy in the mail, and I'm working on a how-to-play movie for it which I hope will help.

Diggity's also in the running in the large field for the Hippodice competition in Germany.  I'm guessing I'll hear something about that in the coming weeks.

Typing game - Z-Type

This is an interesting game - neat graphics, and fun mechanics. It runs in semi-advanced javascript, so you'll need a newer browser. My only complaint is that it starts too easy and doesn't get harder fast enough, at least for a reasonably fast typist like me. I made it to the 54th wave without much trouble.  I've been looking into HTML5 javascript as a possible platform for some game ideas, and the library this is based (ImpactJS) on looks pretty easy to use.