Wow, it's been 24 hours already? Let's see who our contest winners are this time! (The answers may surprise you )
Making bank with third place, it's...
Nitrogen, with Cold Cash Crisis!
Am I seeing things? Why, second place goes to...
bebn legg, with ILLUSIONARY INFRASTRUCTURE!
Finally, in first place, a level which we all live in. The winner is...
NerDose, with industrial society!!!!
Folks, tell us what our winners have won!
Hmm, this doesn't seem right. Anyway PM staff for game codes or whatever. EDIT: Ask Noivern about it don't ask me oh god please don't ask me i don't have any codes
In addition to the above trophies, each participant that didn't get disqualified will receive the below trophy!
Unfortunately, we did have to disqualify two entries, as the judges determined the difficulty went beyond what was expected from a standard level design contest. There were also some entries that did not use a resource from every provided set; however, the rules as posted in the submissions thread did not clearly state this as a requirement, so it didn't feel fair to disqualify these entries. Instead, they will receive a 20% scoring penalty for each resource missing from their level.
You can view a more thorough summary of the scores here. Below you can find the individual judge comments, including those from our backup-judge-turned-full-judge-turned-staff-member AmperSam!
Please let me know if there's any scoring discrepancies between the score spreadsheet or any of the judge comments. Trophies should be sent out once the resident goose wakes up.
I really appreciate everyone that put out an entry despite all the initial difficulties with this contest. I feel like the 24-hour contests haven't gotten as much love as they used to, and I hope in the future we can really get our next themes right. Even still, there are some seriously great entries from this contest that everyone should check out. As always, fire away any comments or criticisms here or in #24ho-discussions on Discord.
I did it! I got first in a contest holy shit!
also sorry for that awful reference. I genuinely didn't know the meme I took inspiration from had such a tragic backstoryI suck at ASM and AMK
I think it's the first time I've been in any top 10. It's a strange and cool stuff.
Congrats everyone. Everyone did a good job. It was a good contest.Now that I've started working, I won't be able to be as active as before. This is really very sad and depressing for me.
WORK IN PROGRESS
▬ good old days 4 (30/? level(s) completed)
▬ dumb 2 - strange levels in my notepad (22/62 level(s) completed)
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By the way my Youtube channel
Congratulations everyone!
I knew NerDose's level would become a phenomenon, and to me this ranking is well deserved.
I also want to greet all the friends I've made along the way
Thanks for the organization, the playtesting, the fanjudging.
Until next time!
PS: to answer the judging comments:
- idk why the pause freezes the game, maybe some wonky AddMusic issue
- idk why the empty row below part 2, I had it filled in LM. So it was below the lowest row
- of course I gathered the power to make an unfocused 2nd part, at that point I was in point with only 2 hours left
And therefore, I became the Unfocused Man, stated verbatim on my user profile. I'm comfortably living with that impairment but I'll learn better over time.
Whoa, I got 10th?! Definitely the best I've done in any contest, and it was with a level I cranked out in like 3 hours.
Also congrats to NerDose, well deserved win. RIP Tenant Mario thoughCheck out my WIP romhack!
I am certainly happy with 6th place! Did better than I thought the level would do to be honest.
Certainly the hardest contest I've entered so far, whether that be for all the wrong reasons is up for debate... EITHER WAY, this was still a fun contest to enter!
GGs to all the entrants!Art by @ScoottheBat
Top 4, nice
Had a lot of fun working on my entry, grats to the winners!
Hey there!
Firstly, I want to thank the 24h Judges for all their hard work. Judging a contest is no easy feat, regardless of the size. Everyone involved put in a lot of hard work, and I greatly respect them for doing that. I also want to congratulate NerDose for winning, his level was extremely impressive to me.
However, I am really writing this post due to some questions / concerns I have with my own level being disqualified. I would like to at the very least publicly defend myself regarding some of my choices, and I would like clarity from some of the judges if possible on certain topics. I am not disagreeing with their decision at all, but I do think that said decision confuses me in a few ways. Hopefully this post will clarify a few things.
Usage of Resources
Okay so, I'm probably not the first to admit that this contest's implementation and documentation of the included resources were rather confusing, and the rules themselves did not really help me much. My assumption when creating my level was that we were supposed to choose resources from each list, but not that you were supposed to use something from every list. This is something that other participants ended up missing as well. However, I realized I would be disqualified (lol) at the last second had I not followed that rule, so I hastily put that last screen in with the time I had. This in itself was difficult because of the poor documentation. For example, the Megaman 2 Screen Scroll relies on information not included in the contest's readme. Originally in a version I actually submitted due to cutting it close to the deadline, the scroll would randomly kill you. I managed to get this fixed, but it was only after looking at Mandew's original files which included the information necessary to set up (which also wasted me a lot of time...) Ultimately in the end the others who didn't follow this rule got a 20 percent penalty, but I find it kind of annoying that my own attempt to try and not get me DQ'd was partially responsible in the first place. I will admit that the ending is a bit hamfisted in regard to how the resources are used, but in the context of a 24 hour contest, it's rather hard to come up with using 3 other types of resources mandatory to a contest in a last second.
Difficulty
This was the stated reason for the Dq in the original post. However, I was confused by this too. There are other levels in this contest that I would consider to be much harder than mine, for example Electrical Leakage. That one was scored low for high difficulty, which I thought was fair. However, I think that grouping my level with the other disqualified level (Sunset Sunday) is a poor decision. Sunset Sunday is a flat out kaizo level, which was not permitted by the original rules. Mine was simply a Standard: Very Hard level. Are Very Hard levels now outside the scope of a Standard Level Design contest? If so, I would heavily recommend adding that to the rules next time as well. As for MarioFanGamer's comment about if the last jump was possible hitless, I have a recorded video if he would like a look. I will admit that the level is very hard, but I tried to combat that with letting the player take capes into the level via a powerup farm prior to the level, which could help with managing tight jumps (Deppy even said he did this, and I think this is totally fair because the level was designed around that.) I stand by my decisions for the level, including a lack of midpoint as I felt that without it the level would be off balanced and both parts would be too short. However, I don't think disqualifying it was the right move. Judging by the actual reviews, all the Judges barring James gave it an actual numerical score too. This part to me is the most frustrating, as it could have very easily been given a score in the contest without much discussion (assuming you say James gives it a 0 in place of a Dq, which I think would be respectable if that was his opinion). If you want to rate the level low, I think that's a perfectly valid choice! I admit that the level is niche and was designed with a certain audience in mind (who sadly of which none were judges haha...), but I don't think that disqualifying it was the best choice to go. If you want to knock points off for high difficulty, that's fine! However, I truly think that the level was not as difficulty / hard to manage as other levels in the contest, and far easier than the actual kaizo level submitted.
I don't expect any scores to actually change, but I wanted to give my two cents regarding the situation. Regardless, I'm very happy with what I made, it's actually one of my favorite levels to date. As a result, regardless of the outcome I think this contest was a success. I enjoy making levels, and I enjoy improving as a level maker, which I think this contest definitely helped me do. Once again, thank you judges for all your hard work!
Some of the end results conflict with my personal rankings, but regardless congratulations to the winners (especially NerDose, with their great first-place level)! I enjoyed fan judging this contest, and I'm interested to see what is in store for next 24hoSMW.
I said this in the Discord server, but I agree that if Heraga's level was disqualified for extreme difficulty, Electrical Leakage 100% should have been disqualified too. That level was far more unforgiving and also did not have a checkpoint of any sort. Disqualifying one over the other feels inconsistent (and the resource thing doesn't matter much either because there were several levels that didn't use them all). I personally think the results should be adjusted; this contest isn't getting a compilation hack made of it or anything, so it's not too late to change the spreadsheet around a bit.Check out my WIP romhack!
We ultimately decided to disqualify the level was because of this rule:
You must not submit an overly difficult or joke level. Breaking it results in a disqualification.
Normally we just have an upfront "No Kaizo" rule, I think some confusion around the debates surrounding this (i.e. very hard vs. kaizo light, or "kaizo-inspired" design) meant the rule ended up much more open-ended. Like with many other things about this contest, this was something that should've been caught earlier and discussed, as I believe this would have been changed otherwise. Personally, I was with Jupi that Electrical Leakage was a harder level (not to mention the multiple levels from the last 24-hour contest that were even harder that also weren't disqualified), and I did not want this level to be disqualified. However, because of this open-ended rule, and because ultimately every judge struggled with the level in some way (like I said in my comments, I had to use the cape to complete it) we decided to disqualify it.
Originally posted by DeppySlide
Normally we just have an upfront "No Kaizo" rule, I think some confusion around the debates surrounding this (i.e. very hard vs. kaizo light, or "kaizo-inspired" design) meant the rule ended up much more open-ended.
I guess that makes sense. However, in that case it should be specified that "Very Hard" style levels should be DQ'd in future contests if that is the consensus. The wording is fairly open-ended, and I truly hope it's clarified more in later contests.
Congratulations to the winners! I was especially impressed with nerdose's entry.
My entry was incredibly rushed, and I do want to point out
the secret exit in my level is obtained by dying in the autoscroll room, as that is the only way to activate the midway exit. I think some judges realized this and others didn't. Obviously this was unclear on my part, and could have been fixed if I were less rushed.
7th place!? I'm very surprized, considering it received mixed reviews from fan judges, and I myself think there are some flaws, but at the same time the contest didn't allow to insert additional resources and re-insert resources for bugfixes (as you probably know, there are a lot of issues with the baserom, like the platform not spawning bombs sometimes), so that probably was considered. +The puzzles themselves I thought are not bad.
Also congrats to all participants, and especially NerDose for his entry, I enjoyed it a lot and I predicted it would place very high.
I am satisfied with the 20th place.
Congratulations all winner!
I am yoshi9429 enjoying Lunar Magic and Touhou Danmakufu ph3 and RPG Maker MV.
I expected a good rank, but getting the 3rd place and seeing my entry being a judge favorite was a really good surprise.
Participating to this 24hoSMW contest was an exciting experience since I had to go outside my comfort zone by using unusual resources for me (first time I've done something with the frozen blocks and Money is Life UberASM) instead of the classic ON-OFF block I use too often.
I would notice that I found funny that the fan judges have liked the first autoscroll half while the judges prefered the second half with frozen blocks, especially given the fact I spent respectively 6-7 hours for the first half and 2 hours for the second half. I definitely prefered making the first half than the second since the latter was rushed and less interesting in terms of setup in comparison.
That being said, congratulations to all participants and (fan) judges for their involvement. I'm curious to see what the next 24hoSMW will be.
A 10th place tie with JupiHornet, how nice! 🤝
It was once again fun (and rather thrilling) to make another level for a 24hoSMW. I'm happy with how my entry turned out overall, though I do understand the missed opportunities with it. There truly was more I wish I could've done, but I suppose such is the price to pay for designing a level within just 24 hours.