Sponge Plugin Competition - Looking Ahead

Now that the second Sponge Plugin Competition has concluded I wanted to take a moment to address feedback regarding them as well as announce the next competition start date.

Requirements

Here are the planned rules for future competitions. All plugins will be eligible for submission unless otherwise specified.

  • Must be your own code.
  • Must be a plugin for SpongeAPI (NMS and dependencies are allowed but it should be primarily SpongeAPI).
  • Must be a OSI-compliant license with a public-facing source repository.
  • Must be functional. Plugins that cannot run will be disqualified.
  • Must be compatible with the current release version of SpongeAPI.
  • Submission must not have won a Sponge Plugin Competition before.
  • Only one submission per person. If more than one submission is found by the same user then we will only use the last submission.
  • You must be 17+ or have signed approval from your parent/guardian.
  • Winner(s) will have 48 hours to reply from time of contact else a replacement will be chosen. A community vote may be held to help aid the choice in replacement.

Scoring

In the past we tried scoring every plugin based on several factors including code quality, uniqueness and creativity. Going forward Project Managers and above will vote on a plugin they feel deserves to win. Plugin with the highest votes will become the winner and second will be the runner-up. If there is a tie between any, a vote will be held with those two as the only option to break said tie.

Results for the internal vote will be published after the SoS that the winner(s) are announced in.

Reward

With the upcoming Sponge Plugin Competition we will be opening up the rewards a bit to extend in to the console realm.

Runner-Up: Will receive a $40 in value prize from the list below.
Winner: Will receive a $60 in value prize from the list below.

Prizes
You will have the choice between…

  • A reasonable amount of games (3 or less) totaling (before tax) up to the value of your prize from Steam, Origin, or GreenManGaming.
  • Gift card code matching the value of your prize for one of the following places: Nintendo eShop, PlayStation Store, Xbox Marketplace or GameStop.

Prize options are not guaranteed and are limited by the availability of the given prize at the time of collection.

Timeframe

We’re going to aim for future competitions to end around the time of a State of Sponge. Winners will be announced during the State of Sponge stream and will be contacted afterwards to receive their prize.

We want to give people time to do competitions so this is what we are planning for lengths…

Submissions: Submissions will be open for three months from start to finish.
Review: Three weeks will be allotted to reviewers to go through all submissions and grade them.
Winner: Winners will be announced during a State of Sponge and contacted afterwards.

It may seem like the Review period is a bit long but we want to ensure that reviews are properly done on each submission and not rushed.

With this in mind. We’re limiting the amount of competitions to two a year. A Summer and Winter competition.

Submissions

We plan to add support to Ore for marking a plugin as a competition entry. We’ll accept the last upload made before the deadline passes when judging.

In the event Ore support does not make it in time, we will continue with the current system we’ve used for submissions.

Ore Integration

We want to make it simple to submit your plugin. The idea is to add a ‘Submit to Competition Winter 2016’ button to the settings page of your project. Once submitted, pressing the button again will allow you to remove the plugin from the submission list.

Winners of a competition will have a badge on their project that shows [{Trophy #} {Season} {Year}]. So something like [1st Winter 2016].

Competitions will have their own sections in Ore. Something along the lines of /competition/2016/winter/.

With all that in mind let me state that while we would love to have this ready in time for the next competition but make no promises.

Sponge Plugin Competition - Summer 2016

The next competition will be held from June 30th 2016 until September 30th 2016.

Review will be held from October 1st through October 22nd and the winners will be announced during the State of Sponge on October 29th.

10 Likes

:thumbsup: Finally, less ambiguity about the prize, the better. I’m okay with First and Third competition rewards, Second was too vague.

Must be UTF-8 compatible encoding.

Um… Java .properties do not support any encoding other than ISO-8859-1. UTF-8 only can be used through Unicode escapes.

That wasn’t meant to be on that list. Fixed now. :slight_smile:

1 Like

The Ore integration sounds very encouraging! I hope I can come up with an idea soon! :slight_smile:

If I understand the rules correctly, I can start the development process before the contest have even started? It just need to be submitted during the submitting period?

I would agree. I’d even say the plugin could be already published. Am I right?

I’m just afraid if I start working now on the plugin, I won’t be able to enter because I started beforehand. That’s why I’m asking.

You are correct. We removed the requirement for plugins to meet certain criteria to allow more people to participate. Only condition at the moment being that plugins that have won prior contests may not use that for submission.

4 Likes

The only change I would make to the rules, is disqualifying any plugin entered previously, not just the winners.

This will encourage more plugins to be made for sponge, rather then people submitting the same plugin a few times, stifling the range of plugins in the competition.

The main reason I disagree is that this will encourage people to do their submitted plugins and make new ones instead of continuing to improve them.

This isn’t the Windows Store. We want quality over quantity.

Note: I love Windows 10 and Windows 10 Mobile but the app availability isn’t quite there. Thus my comment. :wink:

8 Likes

Best quote over… KingGoesGaming high fives Grinch o/

5 Likes

I originally made changes to the rewards to be gift cards to allow people better flexibility of their reward for winning. However upon attempting to get gift cards from the three vendors I wanted to support (Steam, Origin and GreenManGaming) it became very apparent that it was a PITA to do this.

With that said. What does the community want to do for rewards? I want your feedback on this.

I reallllyyy liked the reward system you made… If your gifting the games anyway, can’t the winner just choose a game and inform you of their choice?

So you think we should stick with the ‘You choose a game from these vendors’?

Yes, personally I really like that system. Maybe choose games which add up to x dollars, but yes…

This means that the games i donated are wasted :disappointed: not that they would have been used ny me though xD

Of course i agree with the update to prizes, it’s more definitive

My goal was to make it simple on both ends as doing mass gifting on all three isn’t as simple as a few clicks. While gift cards would solve this it appears that they don’t want to play nice when it comes to selling them.

With that all in mind… I’ll leave it open for discussion to see how others feel. We have a bit to decide before the competition starts up again.

@MoeBoy76 Sorry! :frowning:

Does anybody now if there is gonna be a 1.9 SNAPSHOT release of sponge?

Not sure if this is what you are looking for, but here are the downloads for 1.9.4 SpongeVanilla. Remember it is still bleeding so there may still be bugs.

This isn’t the topic to ask/discuss this on. :slight_smile:

3 Likes