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Original post by OrangyTang
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Original post by superpig
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Original post by OrangyTang
Does this years judging criteria include points for "use of elements"? IIRC last year you didn't get any points for use of elements, so a game which included the elements but totally ignored them was judged equal with one that made them a core part of the gameplay.
No, it wasn't. Games that just "bolt on" the elements - just as if they "bolted on" any aspect of the design - suffered in the cohesiveness subcategory. The judging schema is the same this year.
Ah, that makes sense. I didn't realise that cohesiveness also covered the elements as well.
Well, it covers all parts of the design. If you crowbar the elements into your game, then it'll suffer for it just as much as if you'd crowbarred a painful pop culture reference or rickety gameplay mechanic in there. That is, if you just have Element X floating around in your level, it needs to make sense that it would be doing so.
WRT number of elements: Yeah. Originally the whole point of the elements was just to prevent people from submitting games that they've already created, but they can also serve to inspire designs and provide initial constraints to help guide people's brainstorming. From the first point of view a single obscure element would be enough to require that everyone do
some work to modify their games, but that wouldn't help the second. You'll see some people who use all four elements rather than just three because they want to try and achieve that for their own satisfaction, or because they've simply been thinking about all four at the same time and had a design arise from that.
