You may have noticed I’m not running a similar “$1,000 for an indie game” concept this year. This is mostly because I don’t have the bandwidth to deal with running it this year, but also partly for other reasons. Since the first lark, Kickstarter has grown popular for managing the risk of an indie game launch, and it may be a better fit for bringing quality games to market than contests like this one. I have made a point of funding nearly any rpg-related Kickstarter I find. I have to check to see if I’ve spent $1,000 on Kickstarters yet, but it seems like it might be a better use of the cash. Still thinking about it though.

I thought it might be interesting to see what became of some of the other ideas pitched a year ago. Some of these were already close to completion at the time. If you pitched last year, and I get the current details wrong or couldn’t find information about the game you picthed, post a comment to correct me. In the order they were pitched:

• A working copy of The Detective Heroes Gods Role Playing Game was offered for free by its author.
• A test version of Generic Live Action Simulation System can be found in a free system test document.
• The design for Longshot may have found its way to to some of the author’s other games.
• The Final Girl has cover art and long list of playtesters, so appears to be nearing production.
• Seed RPG is on hiatus, but will likely be Kickstarted as some point.
• Peng Lai: Cinematic Chinese adventure! was last seen looking for playtesters.
• Geasa is now available on RPGNow.
• Hot Guys Making Out is being tested at conventions.
• Final Hour of a Storied Age needs beta playtesters.
• Rakehell is being internally tested.
• A Kickstarter for Shelter in Place successfully funded in mid-October.
• I see no mention of Coyote Traffic on its author’s site.
• The progress notes for Rulers don’t lists dates, so it is hard to tell where it is. (By the way, its author created a nifty $1,000 contest of his own.)
• Cthulhu Apocalypse has been published by Pelgrane Press.
• All the references I have for locating Love & Lucky are in languages I do not speak, so not sure where it is.
• Googling for symbolic phrases like M20# is problematic but, since the author acquired the rights to the line, I’m guessing that this pitch mutated into the next official version of MicroLite 20.
• Can’t find information about Digital, though that was a working title, so maybe it is now called something else.
• The author’s blog makes no recent mention of Warriors From the Mystic Mountain.
• The author’s blog makes no recent mention of Gunner Rex.
• As far as I know, Jared A. Sorensen was able to pay his rent.
• Perfect, Unrevised is now available for sale.
• I can’t find any recent references to Life of a Fallen Star.
• I can’t separate the noise when Googling for Redemption in various ways (+rpg, +author’s name, etc.). So, this either means it hasn’t been published, or that I just can’t find it.
• Criminal Element was released at 1KM1KT.
• The design notes for Mortar of Utopia don’t mention any progress.
• Also not getting much search love for Syzygy.

A fantastic game that takes a very specific premise and gives you nothing but that experience.

Elegant game of needs in conflict, well tied to a superbly focused (and interesting) high concept.

The second category is Best Production:

The layout and use of photography do an excellent job of capturing then genre and tone of the game.

Gorgeous, lush book interleaves the production design with the game mechanics.

Elizabeth raised the bar for us all in this great game with an aesthetic mixing the best of hollywood spi-fi with GQ and Vogue.

Congratulations and best of luck to Mr. LaTorra. We can’t wait to see the result.

The next DivNull lark will match the first: a gift of $1000 to help bring an independently published story game to release within a year. That is, pitch me your idea 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 as responses to this post, publicly, will be considered.
• No pitch made after 15 October 2010 will be considered.
• The donation will be made on or before 31 October 2010.
• If your pitch is selected, you have until the last minute of 31 October 2011 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.
• Payment will be made via PayPal, in United States currency. No exceptions.

The winner will be decided solely based on my learned deliberation capricious whim; however, I do take advice. If you see an entry you really like, feel free to lobby for it in a response below.

All responses to this blog are vetted manually before appearing. Historically, I am a bit slow at doing this. I will try to be more prompt for the next few weeks, but if your comment doesn’t show up right away, don’t panic.

Update: This contest is now closed to new submissions. I will, however, leave the comments open for people to give advice on the entries they like.

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

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.

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!)

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

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.