So with the Week of Awesome II coming to a close, some folks have asked me to also write up a post mortem on the entire event. I'm not the best at writing up these sort of things, but i'll see what i can get up.

When did it start?

Maybe a bit odd to start out with, but i'd like to start with why i decided to continue doing the WoA contest this year, in place of Cornstalk from last year. A little over one year ago alot of contest talk was being had from members such as cornstalk, and Alpha_ProgDes. Articles was getting a solid handle, and the CrossBones title was started to be handed out. In it's wake Cornstalk took it upon himself to create this contest, in total we saw 16 entrys, which was pretty fun experience overall. Since then, both Cornstalk and Alpha have become less active on the site, and it seemed to be evident cornstalk wasn't going to do a second week(at the time i created the contest, it said he had been last active in june). So even though i didn't do so hot last year, i still wanted to try to do something like it again this year. Being a full week long event set's the WoA in a slightly different category then most other jams of this nature imo, where alot of jams jump from 2-3 day weekends, to month long affairs, the WoA was intended to be a 3 day jam stretched across a week so that people with day jobs didn't have to feel as stressed out about being limited in time. Obviously some folks use all 7 days, and others might only be able to jam in a quick session during the ending weekend, but overall we had hoped the WoA's time frame would allow people in many different situations to be able to compete in a way they feel comfortable with. So with august soon coming to a close, i Decided to take up the mantle to build a second WoA contest that would hopefully improve upon the prior year's.

What went right?

So what went right with this year's WoA? Participation was insanely high, we saw over a 100% growth in entry's this year then last year, where we had 16 entry's last year, we saw 34 this year! People were posting like crazy, and the added participation points really gave an overall great atmosphere with the ongoing development over the week. Everybody had their own struggles, many folks were pulling out there hair coming down to that last day, reading about people trying to cross out intended feature after feature with only a single day left was enjoyable to see. The level of work put into each project is insane. And too see it come together over the week was great, I loved every journal i read, every post i read, every screen shot, and every video. It was all pretty awesome. I'm also happy that with the help of stormynature, lactose, orymus3, and 0sok we were able to put up 5 positional prizes this year, and overall had much larger prizes to hand out to everyone. The judging was also handled so much better this year imo, as that is what i had originally set out to change i'm fairly happy with the way it turned out.

What went wrong?

too be perfectly honest, from my perspective not a whole lot went wrong. Unfortunately it seems Aurioch has gone MIA since the ending of the competition. The amount of work to judge each entry also took a fair bit longer than I had expected it too, while 34 entry's doesn't sound like a whole heck of a lot, when you combine that with having to think critically about a series of category's, as well as add in critique's/reviews on each entry, the time consumption quickly adds up, and is what took up much of our time. In the end though it still took only a week for nearly every judge to finish up, so it wasn't too bad overall. Also after reading a reply riuthamus had in the judge's thread, it has given me cause that next year might see a redesign of the scoring system to better facilitate the offset from harsher judgments. Another issue I found was the time that went into keeping up with every person involved, tracking down journals/blog/individual posts to evaluate participation points, and the effort that went into sorting through each judge's score was much greater than i had anticipated, This has already led me to start thinking of ways to better handle things next year, so that I don't end up losing so much time to the more trivial tasks i found myself doing this year.

What can i expect next year?

Me and stormy are currently in talks about how to create a better competition for next year. The first thing we are hoping to do is to better promote the competition overall, while the main competition is likely to be held in August, we will most likely start promoting it a month of two ahead. This year's competition had about a month's delay from announcement to the actual contest really helped to spread the word, and generate a fair bit of interest. At the same time we hope to bring much larger prize base to boost the level of participation. I'd also like to better facilitate the use of social media to leverage during the competition, through video feeds such as twitch, posts from facebook, and twitter, etc. We did have a twitter tag this year #gdnjam, but it didn't receive the type of love that I would have like to have invested into it. Overall It's going to be an even bigger competition next year, and I truely hope i'll see alot of returning faces.




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