later this evening has turned into this morning… apologies!
ok, here’s where the competition is headed… we’re going to do a number of things to try and get more folks involved, both in terms of submissions as well as voting… to do this, we’re going to be reducing the word count (just hear me out!) to 350-400 words per story, and providing “parameters” for each weekly submission…
let’s just bullet list this out:
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starting with the next cycle (cycle 3), each cycle will have an overall theme, with each week having stories that fall within the theme… the idea being that writers can naturally progress their story over the course of a cycle, with each weekly submission representing a portion of the overall story…
- ex. using The Discovery of Magic in Stonehearth as a theme, the writer has a number of choices… they can submit one story, one week, and wait for the finals… or, each week can be an entirely new story, that falls under the main theme; or they can submit a story on week 1, and then follow up on week 2 with a continuation of the previous weeks storyline (etc., progressively towards the finals)…
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we’re going to be applying “parameters” to a given week, whether that’s to include certain elements in the story (there has to be a protagonist name @Geoffers747, etc.), or the material must be of a specific type (limerick, haiku, written in 3rd person, or written as a medieval bards song, etc.)
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we’ll be enabling a “point system”, where contributors will automatically get points if they tie their stories together from week to week (with the bonus points increasing as the weeks progress)… basically, if the writer makes multiple contributions during a cycle, and those stories relate to each other, they will get “automatic likes” added to each subsequent week… nothing extreme, just enough motivation to a) contribute more and b) provide an overall story across the entire cycle…
- we’re thinking a week 2 submission, that is related to a previous week 1 story, gets 1 additional “like”, with a week 3 story, being related to week 2 and 1, getting an additional 2 likes (these numbers might get adjusted)
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finally, we want to incorporate the monthly winning entries into a new mod idea (which i’ll be drawing up shortly) called (aptly enough) the Stonehearth Scribes; those winning stories will be featured in the mod, and discovered during the course of the game… there’s a good chance this mod will involve the very talented @voxel_pirate…
since we are in the middle of cycle 2, it seems fair to continue with the cycle as before (one theme per week), until we close out the cycle… but, we will introduce some of the changes mentioned above for these last two weeks (word count, story parameters, monthly winner ending up in the mod)…
as this is a lot to absorb, please let me know if any of this is confusing, etc. and let me know if there are any gaping holes in the plan, or if you think we’re taking this in the wrong direction… 