ok folks, we’re in dire need of a “refresh” for the Writer’s Workshop… whereas the Cubicle Competition is a smash hit, the Workshop doesnt have as strong a following…
this is partially do to the “investment” on the voter’s part (reading text is obviously more time consuming that viewing an image), and (perhaps) partially due to the design of the competition itself…
with that in mind, i want to ask you all what might make the contest more engaging, enjoyable and… enthralling?
i digress… i have some ideas in mind, and have had some great feedback via PMs, but again, being the democratic mod that i am, wanted to ask the community as a whole…
if you can think of one or two “things” which might make the contest more approachable, or enjoyable (both from the writers and readers perspective), please let me know!
i’m working on a revision now, but before i make any announcements, wanted to collect more feedback… thanks!
to be fair I only know of 3 writers on Discourse: @naturalnuke, @CableX17 and Myself and even then I never put the things I write up here. Qubicle everyone has access too, it’s easy to learn, and it’s fun. Writing takes a lot of time to develop.
excellent point! although, i would counter than crafting some of the more details models in qubicle can be equally time consuming!
but yes, one of the ideas im working on is story length (which might vary from week to week, and theme to theme)… we might ask for poetry, short stories, limericks, etc…
I will counter that with the fact I managed master a number of tools within a week. Even without my amazing learning speed it wouldn’t take long to make it to a good level. (I’m so modest)
Writing isn’t that hard, is it? I’m not the best writer here, but its easy for me to just go “Oh, a topic… well, I’ll sit here for thirty minutes and write up something snazzy, I guess!”
I dunno. I’m not trying to sound like “Hmhmneeeh, these dirty peasants can’t write as well as me, how unfortunate, neeeeh!” I just don’t understand why its so hard to articulate your thoughts onto a piece of paper. I’m sure we all, as gamers, have great writing potential (which is why I get confused as to how game writers are so bad at their jobs).
As to getting people to read them more, how about making a picture a requirement? At least one, and it doesn’t have to be great! Some people like visuals.
The picture idea could be interesting if taken as making a hybrid qubicle/writing competition. Make a picture/s in Qubicle and then write a bit on like history or a story about it or something. Could be interesting if for example for monster/titan themes they had to write like a fake bestiary entry for whatever they made to with the images.
Haha, I’ve got this. We need to do a hybrid competition, but with a different person submitting each part. Like say @Geoffers747 akes a model based on the theme, and @SteveAdamo writes a story about it, based on the qubicle creation. People make their own teams, but you can’t team up with someone two theme’s in a row (excluding finals, if you did the last week together before finals, you should still be able to group together for the final, that’s a separate beast of course.)
I think it might be cool to have 3 competitions: The Writers Workshop, The Cubicle Competition, and a Hybrid of the two. So the hybrid would be for people who want to make models to go along with their story. It could also be a place were two people are randomly paired up, one from the writing place and one from the cubicle competition. They could private message each other to collaborate. It would be a cool way of getting more lore and making our community closer if you see someones name and remember “Oh yeah, we teamed up that one time and he made me an awesome dragon to go with my dragon story” or something like that.
The only problem with 3 is that the Writing Competition has very low numbers as is, hence the change. This will surely only detract from it’s audience by having 3, making it a tad pointless to have in that situation.
However, your thoughts on the hybrid competition are very sensible.
I would love to find a partner in crime to compete in a hybrid competition. The team aspect would thrill me so I’d rather would love if the pixel artists and we writers could team up in a way that would allow both parties to influence the other.
It should have longer durations for submissions so teams have time to form and find their groove.
But for the writing competition itself I’ll try to tackle whichever changes come along and hopefully I’ll do better so people like @Pandemic won’t forget me as easily as now (sniff) !
… what if instead of two or three, there would only be one hybrid competition?
Teams could form themselves, or an additional topic could support (e.g. here my art, looking for story). The teaming aspect sounds interesting to me, in terms of bringing people together.
The only challenge I see… who says that people would read the story and not just vote for the art?
i was wracking my brain, thinking of some comedic responses to this… it seemed fitting to come up with a list of “snobby” names… with that, i present the following:
