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Please vote for the project that you feel should be the winner of the contest! Your choices are Chanku's project, Hugsim's project, or tatte's project, and you can find the downloads/pages for their projects in their project topics. This vote will remain open for around 72 hours from this post.

I vote for Hugsim's project.

It's complete, easy to run, fulfills the given theme beautifully and is fun to play.

I vote for Hugsim's project. I really liked tatte's project, but as far as I can tell, Hugsim's project is the only one that actually fits the theme.

After considering all three projects, I will also vote for Hugsim's Project.

However, I thought all the projects had merit, and since I'm on the Council and have some experience in design and programming I decided to give my thoughts on each one...note that I didn't look through the code unless I had to. Since this was being judged by Citizens, I kept it to the criteria a non-programmer might use such as whether it fit with the theme, how simple it was to get into and use, and whether I ran into any issues or errors. I also included some thoughts on how I thought each project could be expanded or improved, in case anyone was interested in doing so.

Chanku's Project
I have to wonder how many people really tried this one out, because even as a programmer I had a time with it...this is definitely not a user-friendly program, and I ended up having to delve in code. For example, the documentation says to change lines in the code to authorize people and to change the formatting of commands, but doesn't say what file to do so in. In another part of the documentation, it gives the link and delink commands as .connect and .disconnect, when they are actually &connect and &disconnect by default. I then ended up having to look through the code to find the commands...although there is a command to get a list of commands, it wasn't mentioned anywhere in the documentation that I saw. Then once when I was using the GUI to connect, I got a Python error because I didn't include the port...this was easy enough for me to figure out, but non-programmers wouldn't have been able to.

It's not that a IRC bot can't be accessible to the average user (the target audience of this contest), but if you're going to put out something so unfamiliar to the average user, the documentation has to be excellent, and the errors have to tell the user in plain English what they're doing wrong. You should never have an average user attempting to decipher programming errors, and they should never have to modify code to get the program working. My feeling is that this project would have benefited greatly from having a non-technical user that wasn't involved in creating the program to try to figure it out and come back with the parts they got stumped on or had questions about.

tatte's Project
Had it fit the theme in some way, it would have had my vote. At it's core, this is similar to many sites I've seen in the past decade, some of which has been polished and expanded to the point that they rake in money. I didn't have any issues playing the game, although there was a point where I had $5 and the game wouldn't let me buy any weapons because I supposedly didn't have the money. I was also curious about how the amount of money you make is determined...after the fighter's fee, in the first fight I made $19, the second fight $8, and the third fight $6.

Other than that, it could just use some expansion and polish...it'd be nice to know who your fighter is fighting against, and perhaps even have a progression of tougher opponents or some kind of ranking system with NPC fighters. Maybe have PvP against other players' fighters, but overall I thought it was a great shell game, and with some TLC could really become something in time. I would encourage you to continue developing and growing it.

Hugsim's Project
Overall, this project reminded me of Alter Ego, a game from 1986 where you go through life from birth to death responding to various situations which adjusted a number of stats that determined the sort of person you'd become. I didn't have any technical problems with it, it was simple to get into, and it was fun to play...I thought the title "United In Love - [your name] and [partner name] was a nice touch, too. The only issue I have is one that I have with every game like this, which is that in actuality each issue is subjective...for example, why is it on the second day that although you both want to stay at home, choosing to stay at home will get a negative reaction from your partner? It's not really a criticism of the project...Alter Ego was written by a psychologist and I have similar questions about it at points.

If you wanted to expand (and I think it could be cool to do so), there's so many directions you could go...more stats, more situations, perhaps even randomized situations, more factors to consider (friends? ex-lovers? coworkers?). There's no shortage of aspects to a relationship that could be explored.

tatte's Project
Had it fit the theme in some way, it would have had my vote. At it's core, this is similar to many sites I've seen in the past decade, some of which has been polished and expanded to the point that they rake in money. I didn't have any issues playing the game, although there was a point where I had $5 and the game wouldn't let me buy any weapons because I supposedly didn't have the money. I was also curious about how the amount of money you make is determined...after the fighter's fee, in the first fight I made $19, the second fight $8, and the third fight $6.

Other than that, it could just use some expansion and polish...it'd be nice to know who your fighter is fighting against, and perhaps even have a progression of tougher opponents or some kind of ranking system with NPC fighters. Maybe have PvP against other players' fighters, but overall I thought it was a great shell game, and with some TLC could really become something in time. I would encourage you to continue developing and growing it.

While making the game I planned too far ahead and made it so that tavern makes sure you have enough money left to pay your cheapest fighter his wage. With the current mechanics this is unnecessary and since unexplained, a bad feature to have.

The amount of money player makes is simply determined by a dice, as the stats of his opponent. I had bigger plans for the game but ended up just rushing it out for the sake of at least participating.

Thank you for your feedback. It definitely would be fun to keep developing this, but for maximum audience I need international accessibility and my own server just can't provide that. This demo is hosted on free service and quality of those tends to be pretty bad.

Thanks for the feedback. The documentation could have been better, and for the most part I was rushing it. The GUI came in late, really late actually, and I had no one to actually test it on Windows before the deadline. The documentation was/is a product of essentially me rushing to get it done (after I added in the GUI), and me having gotten no sleep.

However I did have fun doing it, excluding the GUI issues that I had ran into...

At this point, with voting over, it would seem that @Hugsim is the winner!

@Chanku - The important thing is that you had fun with it. I personally think that future contests should be longer, maybe even a month...I noticed that people ended up having to rush, and a few people decided not to participate because they were so busy this week. I would suggest that you pick a month to have it and advertise it a week or two in advanced so people can make plans to participate.

@tatte - I feel for you...a lot of my early projects were on free hosts, and I don't know how many of them just up and disappeared. It's what encouraged me to take the plunge and start paying for hosting. I would say it should be fine to keep developing it though, so long as you keep backups, and maybe you can get it on a different host in the future. Who knows? Maybe even here.

Yeah. I do like tatte's thing.

Also Wintermoot the main goal is to be a Ludum-Dare type contest, meaning it is supposed to be short. While I will be doing this again, anyone may host another one, with modified rules. (The contest itself is designed to be run by anyone if someone wants) I may have it rub a week and half or two weeks, but a month would be a bit long for this kind of competition. May put together a 'mini' competition or whatever for a month long and with more relaxed rules though.

Anywho the next competiton will be in March.

Perhaps, but I think for something as involved as a programming contest, the more time you give the more people that can join after it's already started and the more and higher-quality the final projects will be. After seeing how great the projects turned out after a week, I think contests like this could be a launchboard for people to create projects that last beyond the actual contest, either in Wintreath or independently, and a longer time would probably help there too. I'm not sure that a short contest for something so involved makes sense here, but I suppose we'll see.

In any case, I may participate in the next one. I've had an idea in mind for awhile.

@tatte - I feel for you...a lot of my early projects were on free hosts, and I don't know how many of them just up and disappeared. It's what encouraged me to take the plunge and start paying for hosting. I would say it should be fine to keep developing it though, so long as you keep backups, and maybe you can get it on a different host in the future. Who knows? Maybe even here.

Funnily enough I have been paying for hosting 2006-2015. For a few years I even ran a small reselling deal and had around ten paying customers and little over hundred users of free services. Oh the good old times. (Fuck Facebook, they killed personal websites.)

Congrats Hugsim!

Alright and congrats hugsim on winning.

I have actually already planned the next two events. Although I may hold a 'mini' of sorts during the wait between the second and the third

Thank you everyone for voting for me, and well done to everyone else.

Overall, this project reminded me of Alter Ego, a game from 1986 where you go through life from birth to death responding to various situations which adjusted a number of stats that determined the sort of person you'd become.

I haven't heard of that, but I might have to check it out now.

I didn't have any technical problems with it, it was simple to get into, and it was fun to play...

This was my goal for the project. Make something (mostly) foolproof and simple to get into, while still being rather fun.

I thought the title "United In Love - [your name] and [partner name] was a nice touch, too.

I'm rather proud of that one, actually.

The only issue I have is one that I have with every game like this, which is that in actuality each issue is subjective...for example, why is it on the second day that although you both want to stay at home, choosing to stay at home will get a negative reaction from your partner? It's not really a criticism of the project...Alter Ego was written by a psychologist and I have similar questions about it at points.

Yeah, that's an issue with all these games, as you said. There's no real way around it, except for changing the events yourself. I tried to make them somewhat balanced, but that's always difficult. The game is moddable though, the text-file in the data-folder contains all the events and the opinion modifiers. Theoretically the game could be used for anything with opinions, no marriage-related things are hard-coded, except for the name of the game, and the fact that you have a partner.

If you wanted to expand (and I think it could be cool to do so), there's so many directions you could go...more stats, more situations, perhaps even randomized situations, more factors to consider (friends? ex-lovers? coworkers?). There's no shortage of aspects to a relationship that could be explored.

I might expand on it. I'm a bit tired of it right now, but I might pick it up in the future again. I realised in the end of the competition that I should've added money as a separate stat, among other things.
I sadly realised it a bit late in the competition to do that, because I'd have to change all the stuff I use to interpret the textfile.
As for the randomised events, I had that at first, but I realised that I didn't have time nor the imagination to write more that the ten events, and I'd rather be able to have the last event say "It's the last day before the wedding...". It'd be easy to change it to randomised events though, one small thing has to change.

Congrats Hugsim!

I know it's a bit late, but where's your game now?  I still want to try it.