MSXdev'17 - Results

Some great games have been released this year. I'd say MSXdev'17 was a succes
A bit surprised though that only 6 people voted for the community prize...

Thanks all for these nice games.

Indeed. I did try to register that time and made the old OSX responsible for not beeing successfull. After that it just went out of my head.

Wohoo!!!!! Thanks a lot to the organizers for this!!!! I definitively hope to be back for MSXDev'18!!!!

I also would like to. Shall we guess this year was an end in a draw between us, dear my rival?

@ghost_jp! Indeed!!!

Since its very first edition, MSXDev' has always been Christmas before Christmas! And once again, thank you all for these great new MSX products and congratulations to the winners! Now, let's play them all!

Par; a special adviser for my development of Draconic Throne, sent me a brilliant graphic in congratulation of my win. It was drawn in MSX GRAPHIC 2 mode, and cleverly borrows a lot of elements from the game. I like his work so much and would like to share it with you. Wish you also love it.

Congratulations! The games created by Santiontanon and Ghost_jp are the same quality as professional. I've been making games for a long time, but I could not reach that level. I think carefully about the cause. And I will challenge next year.

Congratulations to the winners!

The game design of XSpelunker was amazing and fun.
Draconic Throne was a very fresh game. (As a personal feeling It was the most fun game.)
The Tales of Popolon was the very impressive game.

I like MSXdev'17 to create freestyle category.
MSXdev'17 was a very enjoyable and good experience for me.
See you next year.

It's just a score. I personally like your game over all other games in the competition. It's a really good game!

Thanks guys! I got motivated. I'll consider more about polishing music and graphics. MSX forever.

The competition is indeed a great source of motivation! I'm a bit split about what to try out for next year. On the one hand I am curious about MSX2 (even if I never actually owned one), but on the other hand, the challenge of "force-fitting" as much as possible into a tiny MSX1 game is strangely appealing to me!

MSX2 has plenty of constraints, no need for artificial ones .

yeah, I've been reading posts about that, seems like using the MSX2 one can achieve a whole new level of performance by exploiting this parallelism!

As for limitations, if I go for MSX2, I'd probably impose some limit on the cartridge size to myself, just to ensure projects are completed. I found that imposing a limitation of 32KB for my MSX1 games was very useful, since once memory ran out, that was it, nothing else was going into the game, and ensured I finished the game!

I would say the potential gain in performance is usually lost by the higher data bandwidth requirement of the MSX2 bitmap modes though. But it looks nice. And screensplits and scroll registers and palette stuff and commands is a whole new area of excitement to do clever stuff with.

You’re smarter than I am .

Hohoho, omg, that's just 64KB?!?!?!?! The music itself could be that size!

but yeah somewhere in the 64KB - 128KB I think is a good target. 128KB is a LOT of data if you need to fill it byte by byte!!!

Note that MSX2 bitmap data is a lot bigger than MSX1 data, so space fills up quickly if you even add just a title screen and a tile set. And sure you could spend time on compression routines to make it all fit, but that’s time better spent on game functionality.

I'm sure he never rejects your dedication. Go on!

The 2018 announcement is up, but I still have some remarks about last years compo, the more appropriate place to post is here I think. So here's some feedback (observations) from a more or less casual (and not uncritical ) MSX fan:

• Only 6 people from the public voted? That's a bit sad of course, as, at least from this community there seems to be enough interest.
  Having to register (at yet another website) (just) for voting is a barrier perhaps.

  As we're getting (fully) informed here, as a MRC visitor there's little need to visit the MSXdev website other than to download the game and perhaps have a look what people posted there.
  Discussion seems to (primarily) take place here. (Or there must be another place I'm unaware of).

  Thing is: you've got access to a big community right here. Theoretically at least it's possible to host the whole thing here (leaving aside matters of wanting to).
  I bet if you would've asked people to vote here (without the barrier), you would get a way more interesting number of votes.

  Do you've got some ideas yourself how to get more people to vote this year?
  Technically e.g. it should be possible the have some integrated authorization at the MSXDev site (OAuth). This removes the barrier, but that's not that trivial to set up I suppose (requires some investment) & a bit too far fetched perhaps (for this relatively small community).

• To me it's still a bit vague who's behind nowadays MSXDev (and who's behind the moniker 'MSXdev Team' for that matter), and the (official) role MRC takes. I believe it's basically Konamito, and JohnHassink taking care of new posts here, am I correct? Insiders may be aware this, and know the history (started in 2003 or so with Eduardo Robsy (Pitpan), and later Jon Cortázar joining), but outsiders probably are not.

  I believe it would be nice & informational to have bit of history on the MSXDev website.

  Things like this (providing some more (background) info (as static pages - so not concealed in a blog post somewhere)) might attract foreign (read: potentially interested devs (from other communities)) more easily.

• Some more promotion/exposure would be nice. I'm missing a banner here on this site. IMO that would really help generating a feeling this thing is alive.

Being the critic here, I guess it boils down to: keep this an insider event foremostly? No need to change a thing. We're doing fine, got a nice crop of games. Potentially get more (at)traction? Then taking some steps wouldn't hurt.

Anyway, thanks for organizing, and good luck organizing this year's contest!
And of course thanks game devs for participating & giving the scene some really cool games (And if you've got some remarks regarding the contest it's way more valuable you speak out of course, rather than some 'sideline critic' as myself )

Btw, if someone's interested: /wiki/MSXdev ;)

@ ren: Thank you for your suggestions and interest in and support of MSXdev.
We prefer the contest to be independent from any website, blog, social media outlet or community in general, but we welcome and deeply appreciate any form of support or even promotion from all of them. However, for practical reasons, we aim to keep each and every aspect of the contest itself as tight and close to the organization as possible.
We of the team also believe that the contest itself, as an entity, ascends our personal egos. We aren't looking for admiration or even recognition of our persons but are firmly convinced such positive energies should be reserved for the contest and its entries alone. We feel that the base purpose of MSXdev is to make the MSX shine, and not to put the individuals behind the contest in the spotlight. Stemming from that same philosophy, we'd rather see any praise or appreciation going to the participants and their offerings, and ofcourse to the donators and the supportive members of the scene, without whom the contest wouldn't be possible in the first place. We are just here to facilitate and coordinate it all, in the background, and that's all we do.

Also, by acting and communicating as one, through the monicker and identity of "MSXdev Team", speaking as one mouth so to say, we can trust upon it that MSXdev is, and will remain an overarching concept, an institution that everyone else can fully trust in turn. So, who we are isn't important - what we do, is. Meaning it's indeed "vague", but deliberately so.
From our perspective, this is the proper way to handle the responsibility that the original organizers trusted us enough with to pass it on to us, and to continue the great legacy that they initiated.

Anyway, among other things, your post did help inspire us to include a FAQ on the official site, where questions like yours will be addressed and which will also treat subjects such as the history of the contest. So again, thanks for your feedback.

@ Grauw: Indeed, we rely on (among others) MRC and MSXBlog for reporting on the contest, but nothing more. The requirement to register a while beforehand was decided upon as an extra precaution to reduce the window of opportunity for abusing the voting system.
In another thread, you announced to possibly join the contest this year. We hope you will manage it and look forward to your entry very much.

Btw: what are your feelings regarding the banner over here I was talking about?
Perhaps some graphic artist feels drawn... And of course you would need some cooperation from MRC then

If I'm allowed to put on the critic hat once more: any plans on pimping this years logo a bit more? This year's seems to be a bit lackluster..
Could take the place of the site's current logo then (which could have a more slick look anyway AFAIC - not a big fan of the Comic Sans like typeface, which gives a somewhat puerile impression).

I'm done now. All meant well of course. Cheers!