Five days without Internet was tougher than I imagined. But it’s back up now, just in time for the new Neverwinter foundry contest.
To kick off our Season of Dragons campaign, we’ve decided to hold a Foundry contest focused on the Cult of the Dragon! To participate, authors must create a Foundry quest with an average duration of at least 15 minutes that includes the Cult of the Dragon in a meaningful way. The winners will receive some amazing prizes in addition to having their Foundry quests featured for all to admire!
I haven’t had really good luck with contests lately — recently having lost the Shroud of the Avatar game porting contest to what, I feel, was an entry that didn’t conform to the rules of the contest. And likewise, I’m not sure what people are really looking for in a Foundry. Though my The Tempest/EverQuest mashup, “Tempest in a Freepot”, did get featured and did do fairly well, I don’t think it, or any of my foundries to this point, have really delivered what people are looking for. To win this contest, I’ll have to damp down on what I consider are some of my strengths.
First, it needs a title and a description that lets people know what they can expect. Second, it needs to clock in as close to 15 minutes as possible, without falling below that. Third, it can’t reference EverQuest 🙂 You’d think that would be obvious, but I really like recreating EQ in Neverwinter. Always was a personal dream to work for SOE on EQ.
Once people are in, they will probably complete it. The harder challenge, then, is to get them to leave a positive review. And I really have no idea how to go about that. I’m going to try and be a little more linear than usual, lead up to a nice boss fight. Fifteen minutes is not long at all, really — like a good short story, it needs to be pretty economical with characters, maps, and battles. I don’t like, and I don’t think many people like, strings of meaningless encounters. But as a player of many foundries, I also get impatient if there are too few encounters — remembering the no encounter quest Kasul and I did a few weeks back, which I found tedious. I admired the author for trying something so against the trend in an MMO, but in the end, it was, “you’re a dragon, she’s a human, you guys had a kid together, great.”
I’ll go into the plot (so far) of “Fire Sale” in another update.
