AuthorTopic: Suggestion: Weekly Challenges (encouraging progression)  (Read 2215 times)

Offline Ambivorous

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I've long struggled to get into the PixelJoint weekly challenges. Sometimes they are too complex for me to attempt, sometimes I am disheartened by how well the other members are doing, and sometimes they just feel like a waste of time.
Not that I have complaints about the system itself though, and I know it encourages a nice plethora of subjects.

I would very much appreciate a more practical version of the system though. Something aimed at helping people who are newer to pixel art an opportunity to build up assets in an inspired manner.

The idea I had to solve this is as such:
We have weekly challenges, but on a far more practical/usable scale, so instead of having subjects that encourage more artistic -if you will- pieces we encourage the creation of sprites, tiles and scrolling backgrounds.
We could potentially have overarching themes, such as "creating a small mario clone" where the entries from several weekly challenges add up to create the assets needed for a complete game. Could even have a generic program written where you can just shove your art in and then play your own clone.
For those who don't, or can't, participate in every week's challenge the resulting assets could just be used to pad their portfolios, or just for the practice.

Further examples of challenges could be one week having something like, "Create a sprite of a character for a 2D, side-scrolling, platformer using either a 16x16, 32x32 or 64x64 canvas." and the following week, "Create an idle animation for a sprite created in the previous week's challenge (can use someone else's sprite if you did not participate)." with the idea of creating a fully animated (running, jumping, dying, etc.) sprite at the end of a certain number of weeks.

I feel like this kind of challenge will be more valuable to growing members as functional pixel artists and help transition them into the working world or wherever they wish to take their craft.


There are downsides to implementing the idea of course. It requires quite a bit of planning and dedication, and I know there are already a lot of ideas in the pipeline, but I just figured I'd put it out there for you guys to think about.

Any thoughts welcome.
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Offline Indigo

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Re: Suggestion: Weekly Challenges (encouraging progression)

Reply #1 on: January 31, 2016, 11:28:34 pm
The moderation team is currently reforming how we're approaching activities.  We're building a schedule to regularly hold major activities one a month.  These are great ideas, we will take them into consideration when refining the schedule