The Cartographer’s Guild members have spoken, and the entry by relative newcomer Crayons takes the prize in the second DivNull lark.

Crayons has given me permission to reproduce the winning map here (click it for a much larger version):

Elizabeth Shoemaker, recipient of the first DivNull Lark, has announced that its result, Blowback, is now available for pre-order.

Congratulations to Ms. Shoemaker on the completion of your game. I look forward to playing it, and can’t wait to see the iOS tools you have planned.

DivNull conceptualized this month’s mapping challenge over at the Cartographer’s Guild, a site dedicated to making maps for games. I also am sponsoring the contest’s prize, a $200 gift certificate to Indie Press Revolution.

The gist of the challenge is to design a map of a building (or set of buildings) that focuses geomantic energy, under a particular set of guidelines, in one month. This is explained in more detail (with perhaps more asterisks and sportscars than necessary) on the challenge page. This challenge follows the same rules and procedures as the others.

The winner is decided by members of the Cartographer’s Guild forums, which are free to join. Good luck!

(Also, the contest doesn’t mention or require this, but if you want to enter a map, please consider posting it under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Thanks!)

After some difficult consideration of the proposals in our first Lark, DivNull is pleased to award the $1,000 gift to Elizabeth Shoemaker for her interesting ideas for the development of her game Blowback. In addition to helping make a fun game, this gift will help the game offer a fresh depiction of women (with art by women), advance roleplaying’s use of technology and document the production elements for the edification of other designers.

Congratulations and best of luck to Ms. Shoemaker. We can’t wait to see the result.

The Story Games forums focus on the creation of independently produced roleplaying games. On October 2nd, 2009, forum member Valamir started a thread asking members to hypothesize about how they would use $1000 to produce their game.

On a whim, DivNull Productions decided to take this out of the realm of hypothesis, with Wordman posting:

This post started with the following hypothetical:

Posted By: ValamirImagine said benefactor announced “Pitch me your game ideas and the designer whose idea I like best will get $1000 to bring it to fruition”

Other popular game design forums maintain, however, that debate about hypothetical situations are useless and only “actual play” matters. So, let’s play…

As of now, there actually is a benefactor (i.e. me) saying “Pitch me your ideas for how you would use $1000 to either make a new game or improve an existing one that hasn’t been released, and I’ll donate $1000 to the idea I like best to help make it happen”.

Conditions:

• Only pitches made on this thread, publicly, will be considered.
• No pitch made after 15 October 2009 will be considered.
• Donation will be made on or before 31 October 2009.
• If your pitch is selected, you have until the last minute of 31 October 2010 to make good on the idea. At that point, the world will know if you are person of your word, or a failure.
• This donation in no way affects any rights you have to your work. Nor does the donation create any liabilities from your work for the donator. Succeed or fail, you’re on your own.

While this pitch process was neither widely advertised nor, to be frank, particularly well run, a number of compelling proposals were submitted. These remain visible in the thread linked to above, but have also been reproduced as the first 11 comments of this thread as well.

We are no longer accepting pitches; however, there are likely to be more of these “DivNull larks” in the future. This one was something of a trial run, so was deliberately kept somewhat quiet. Future larks will be more public.

DivNull will announce who receives the gift in a few days, both on this blog and in the original Story Games thread.