It was fun! Would definitely try to contribute more if there's another one. As for why I didn't contribute more (I wanted to do more than I did), the biggest issue was I personally didn't have enough time (I would assume similar for others as well). I know that's not what you wanted to hear, but it also ties in with any "structural" problems I noticed. If I had infinite time and less other priorites, I would've done way more regardless.

I mostly agree with swiftcoder, see my comments below.

I hope i didn't alienate anyone away with some of the contributions i made, i know a couple of them were rather large compared to other people.

Not to call you out slicer, but your large commits were part of the reason I didn't do more later on. They were great! =D Just too much at once. There were some others as well, but towards the end you were doing most of the commits (which were rather large lol) with my adding some effects. I didn't have much time to put into it as I would've liked, and anytime I checked back it was a huge change. More to absorb and think about, rather than just playing for a few minutes and making some small updates. Although I guess this would be just as much of a problem for someone only checking every few days or once a week.

Anyone want to chime in with any structural reasons why they ended up choosing not to contribute despite earlier enthusiasm. By structural, I mean reasons related to the running of the experiments and not on personal reasons such as free time, etc.

I think the specific framing of the competition discouraged me from contributing more than trivially:

- Managing the source code via the forum was a tremendous hassle compared to using git, and it just wasn't worth going through. In particular, making a change, refreshing the page, and discovering that you needed to manually rebase your changes on someone else's was just untenable. Anyone on this forum should be able to use/learn git, and I don't think we should be ignoring the right tools for this sort of thing.

- The competition was pitched more as a coding horror than as an effort to develop a complete game, so I was caught off guard when people started taking it seriously.

- The rules favoured very small incremental changes, and I didn't see a path to adding features that way. Major changes seemed against the spirit of the competition, so I didn't add any features in the end.

I didn't really have a problem with the forum commits, and someone did start a repo (though it wasn't really maintained). I wouldn't have a problem with git being a must for the next one though.

As for the horror aspect, I think the horror was more supposed to be the mashup of code snippets, not the game itself. Either way it was stil fun!

Going back to the commit size, I think smaller commits should be more enforced. Anytime I'd check with an idea of something to add, when I had time to later to do it someone had added it already. I was going to do a surprise physics update near the beginning but I was beat to it. Then I wasn't sure what to do next, and my ideas would get behind. I was going to add text support before that update was rolled out lol. I thought to add these things because they were small and quick, but essential systems. All the while, each commit adding these features would change gameplay as well. I ended up mainly just adding effects systems that weren't there yet. I think it should be limited to adding a single feature or small amounts of changes. I'm not picking any names this time but a lot of updates would add some subsystem as well as update gameplay, change some previous functionality etc. Just made it harder to keep up with in the time I had. I feel if commits are more limited, even with more activity, less will change with time. This would obviously take longer to complete something playable and fun, but I think it would give more chance for people to contribute what they can. Plus more contributers with small changes + different coding styles = lots more horror! =]

Also, with larger updates, a lot of gameplay is more the result of one person's idea. This only allows further building on it, and that can only be done so much for any game, really. You also have to "adjust" to that thinking to come with further good ideas as well. Not that this is necessarily bad, but if more people contributed smaller gameplay elements, I think it would be able to evolve more with less effort from each contributor.

It was fun though, and everyone did an awesome job!