TCN Awards

Trumgottist I'm in the process of setting up the first annual TCN Awards, where the best freeware adventure games of 2002 will be voted upon. (The Oscars of the free adventures.) This thread is posted as an opportunity for you to give comments before I actually go ahead with it.

I'm thinking of five categories: Best Game, Best Story, Best Music, Best Graphics and Best Puzzles.

Comments are welcome.
Sami_Tervo Hmmm..best freeware game? Not only AGI or SCI? What chances can AGI and SCI have in music or graphics? Perhaps you ought to create categories for modern programming languages and ancient.

Otherwise, a nice idea.
Trumgottist There will be no system-specific awards. The idea is to have awards where there is no diffrerence between what authoring systems were used. If you want a best AGI/SCI game award, you can always set it up yourselves, like the AGS people have done. One of the major reasons behind the TCN Awards is an attempt to tear down the walls between the different adventure game making communities.

And there is nothing to stop an AGI game from grabbing the puzzle award, if it were to have the best puzzles.
Sami_Tervo Well yeah, content is the only chance of AGI&SCI. But I wouldn't expect to see too many AGI/SCI-games in Top Ten even in puzzle/story/game-categories ;)
Eero R Yeah...
Oliver Well...That's not cool... ;)
Corby When would these awards take place?
Trumgottist The nomination process will begin early next week. After that, I haven't decided on the exact timeframes yet, but I'll keep you posted.
Trumgottist Now nomination has started, so head over to http://trumgottist.com/crowsnest/awards.php!
Trumgottist Now the voting has started!
Corby darn! I'll never complete my game in time! Maybe I should release a demo... How long until the judging starts?
Corby i mean how long till judging stops?
Robin_Gravel Judging by the nominees, the TCN Awards looks like AGS Awards.

Robin Gravel
Kon-Tiki @Robin: They're more productive than this community (or just have more active members). That makes that they have more games to be nominated.

-Kon-Tiki-
Trumgottist The voting ends April 13th at 12.00 GMT.

It's hardly surprising that many of the nominees are made with AGS. They are by far the biggest community, and of the 109 games listed at TCN, 60 are made with AGS. But it does not mean that the TCN Awards are a second AGS award ceremony. There are several contenders made with other system.

And, what's more important, I don't think it matters one bit what engine was used to make a particular game. What matters is the end result. As you can see, there isn't a single mention of game engines on the award pages at TCN. (For the record, I'm a SLUDGE user myself.)