The Weekender: The Game Designer Challenge! [Updated!]
September 29, 2014 by warzan
Submissions for the Game Designer position are now closed. However, Illustrators can still apply throughout today!
This Weekender we're announcing an awesome chance for you to flex your creative muscles with a Game Designer Challenge and it's all about zombies! If you have always fancied becoming a Game Designer or Illustrator in this fantastic industry of ours, come Monday you may have your chance, and you even get to spend a bit of time with Alessio Cavatore for a bit of mentoring!
- Game Designer Applications (Closed)
- Game Illustrator Applications (Keep Applying!)
We're asking you to come up with a great zombie (or Halloween based) game idea and if we pick it you and your chosen Illustrator will not only see the game become a print & play reality distributed via our weekly EZine but also win the chance to be interviewed by us and get some mentoring from an industry professional! (The mighty Alessio Cavatore) Find out more by watching the show!
On top of all that goodness we're also talking about the cool Cyntopia: The Future is Now Kickstarter that is starting in the next few weeks and we had an exclusive sneak peek at! There have also been some great developments with Carnevale too!
Last but not least we reveal who won that Facebook Titan!
Happy gaming!
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The one upside to working nights: I can come home and watch the Weekender, doing what it says on the tin every Saturday 🙂
Whoooooo! Saturday morning!! Hello guys!! ^_^
Wow great competition I have my idea already!
Personally I can only see any adaptation of the Silmarillion being done on tv. But done right? As a Rome/ Game of Thrones-style prestige series?
Hell.
Yes.
great show guys. yeah like the catalogue idea.
Good show, very intriguing competition.
I was wondering do you guys have any plans to cover the two new starter sets coming from Spartan Games over the coming month?
I’m personally very intrigued by the Codename Iron Scorpion set for Dystopian Legions.
The LotR movies were a real zeitgeist moment. The Return of the King was the second highest grossing movie of all time when it came out and it jointly holds the record for most Oscars (which was really an acknowledgement of the entire trilogy). All three movies hold ratings in the 90s% on the aggregate websites. The Hobbit movies have made a lot of money, but they haven’t been well received. Their ratings are between 50s-70s% and they’ve won zero Oscars. The comparative performance of the GW product lines stems more from this than how GW marketed them. People came… Read more »
I agree with a lot of this, but I think we need to consider that although it may not be as well ‘recieved’ or as popular as the original trilogy… It’s popularity still dwarfs 40k… And Lego etc seem to have made a reasonably good show of monetizing it.
I actually went down to WW to have a coffee and a chat with Jervis (off the back of his invite in his WD column) and the conversation went towards the LotR success.
He actually said that the amazing success of LotR really wrong footed them as as a small big company, they just didn’t have the resources to manage it’s success properly and since then, GW has been very afraid of situations where they don’t control the marketing and therefore the product push.
I totally agree with @redben. The Hobbit movies are just not good movies. The humour has gone too far (Gimli was never a comedy dwarf in the books and the Hobbit’s dwarfs had a charming, whimsical humour to them, not slapstick), the action set pieces are overblown and feel shoehorned in, the whole tone of the films is off. I know a lot of people who were big fans of the LotRs movies, who went, with high expectations to see the first Hobbit movie and came away horribly disappointed. In fact the only friends I have who bothered to go… Read more »
The point that I buried a bit in the post was that people came to GW for LotR, rather than GW effectively marketing LotR to people. This hasn’t happened with The Hobbit because The Hobbit movies haven’t had anything like the same cultural impact. Lego have done very well marrying their product to IPs. They sell a lot of Batman product, and Batman is more popular than 40K, but that doesn’t mean that Knight Models should sell more Batman minis than GW sell 40K minis, or even that GW would sell more Batman minis than 40K if they picked up… Read more »
I agree about the action scenes, a lot of them seem to have been filmed with ‘ that will look great as part of a video game’ in mind
They just dont seem to capture the magic of the book but that might be looking back with fondness of over 35 years since I first read it
great show thanks guys
What made the first GW LOTR game different was that it was skirmish based… then ‘sustained growth’ and the need to sell more models pushed it towards WarOTR movement tray/mass army mode. Lost it’s differentiator from WHF.
A smaller scale Battle of the 5 Kingdoms box set would fly this christmas.
GW minis were also sold throught the LoTR magazines that came out every couple of weeks – it was about 50% cheaper to get some of them that way, and remember that was when a box of 20 or 24 troops was £12-£15. The world has moved on since 2001-2003; a lot of young people spend more on electronic goods like smart phones, so attributing sale solely to the quality of a movie or marketing is ignoring the array of other factors that influence purchasing. There are a lot of other ‘big’ movies out there like the Marvel and DC… Read more »
I’m not so much ignoring other factors as highlighting a significant difference. The world has moved on and even if The Hobbit movies were excellent, they could never capture the zeitgeist again the same way. The same applies to the likes of Star Wars. The prequels and upcoming sequels may make lots of money, but they won’t be cultural events like the original trilogy. You are correct to say that the De Agostini magazines brought a lot of people to GW, but they were people hungry for product. The Hobbit audience is not hungry for product.
The catalogue idea is fantastic when ever I get stuff from forgeworld they send one and it’s ace and I remember going back when I was a boy getting gws thinking this stuff is amazing and I would like to get more for other games company’s and great show guys
The Hobbit films just felt far too padded out to me. – It’s part of the complaint about it being ‘just walking’ I think (which was a complaint about Fellowship, fair enough). But, the thing is, it just didn’t really feel like they were making progress. In FOTR, characters joined (and left) the group at each section, there was defined goals. You had the dramatic points in between. It just felt much better paced. On the subject of the ezine, I did find myself browsing the catalogue, so it does seem like a good idea. However, I’d suggest avoiding any… Read more »
Interesting talk about the Hobbit… I don’t think that the opportunity to capitalise on the films was anything like as big as the LotR, but I also don’t think GW tried. The LotR really felt like a first – like something millions of people had been waiting for, that had never been done before, and was then done pretty well. I enjoyed the Hobbit films, but they don’t feel new and exciting in the way the LotR did, and I don’t think anything GW could have done would have changed that. Nevertheless, I think they did drop the ball with… Read more »
Alternative Smaugs –
http://news.toyark.com/2014/08/21/bridge-direct-releasing-massive-smaug-toy-136387
http://www.geenemodels.com/dragon-kit/
Some thoughts on the catalogue, and speaking only for myself, as I can usually see all the minis on a website, I don’t get much out of a catalogue. Having a physical copy at least means I don’t need to be online, but having a PDF copy is less useful as I need to be on a device, if not online. I did download the Carnivale catalogue and flick through it, but I wouldn’t have missed it if it wasn’t there.
I have to agree with Warren on the Hobbit movie. I think they have been excellent so far. I cannot see at all why the ratings and reviews have not been as good or better than the first three Lord of the Rings movies. In my opinion Desolation of Smaug was the best of the 5 movies so far. It had everything that is needed to make a good adventure movie. Even the giant dragon in the cave at the end. It was laid out and executed practically perfectly. Maybe it is because the Hobbit has been an adventure movie… Read more »
I think the catalog was very nice. Especially where kickstarters are concerned, you have to scroll through walls of text jumping between sections of pledge levels, stretch goals, etc. it’s nice to have one resource to just see the products at a glance.
I actually have to join in on that the Hobbit movies are better than the Lord of the Rings trilogy:
Even putting the Mary sue called Legolas front and center instead of the background, the beardless dwarves and Smaugs missing legs cannot bring the movie down to the level of a whining crying pretty-boy Frodo.
I really am a fan of catalogs, I usually make sure to get Reapers yearly one, even if it does not contain all of their products.
I was a seriously hardcore Tolkien fan when I was little; can still quote whole sections of the history of Middle Earth. It’s been years since I read any of his books but I was hugely excited by the LoTR films. I even agreed with a lot of his editing, missing out a lot of the irrelevant guff that Tolkien shoved in (Tom Bombadil, the scouring of the Shire, &c.). I loved those films. That said when I heard the Hobbit would be 3 films I lost interest. I’ve not seen them and have no desire to. I’m probably too… Read more »
It was a shame that old man willow was missed I think?
Yeah, definitely entered the game designer contest. Even if I don’t get a chance to do this, I might try to make my game on my own!
Good show like the BOW command icecream van with Marlin Manson tune? The hobbit films were a tad two long but almost as good as LoTR films. Congrats to the competition winner. Loved the BALROG, & invasion look interesting, Any game with zombie killing is a good game.
Surely, GW can do something decent with the Battle of Five Armies. A revamp of Warmaster would hardly be that onerous…
Those tanks were only a tease! D: Enjoyed the show today, and even submitted my own little Halloween game idea.
There was a LOTR RPG with a miniature line. It was called Middle Earth Roleplaying System (MERPS). It went out of print a few years before the Fellowship of the Ring came out.
Back in the day I played a Rider of Rohan who thanks to ICE’s love of voluminous critical hit tables, sustained an electrical crit and all his hair fell out. Later in the campaign I was able to have it magically grown back, but I wound up being the only black-haired Rohanite in the village. The other only other thing I remember from the campaign was us falling off a ship into the sea, and one of the PCs being a dwarf in full plate. The penalty was so high his chances of not sinking were in the negative percents.