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ALEX III: A Three-Day Collaborative Game
Thank you both. Having an active community of people who mostly used a single, "free" (thanks Don Miguel!), and intuitive engine with no commercial aspirations are probably some of the factors that made it possible. It's also relatively easy to "link" maps together, especially once I got better at it after the first game.
Alex games were born out of my experience participating in some of the Gaming World Chain Games (also a cool series to check out), where people would disappear for months without any updates. The expectations of the Chain Game were high, and you had to incorporate other people's work with your own ideas. Alex was supposed to be more inviting and efficient in comparison. Just make a game in 1/3 days, how hard can it be? Even a single RTP map was encouraged.I remember directly asking many people on IRC to make a map for the first Alex. When that came out and turned out better than anyone expected, a lot of people wanted to be part of the second one. People were asking me instead of the other way around.
For better or worse, some people in the community were harsh and honest with their critique, and if you check some of the old screenshot topics you'll see people obsessing about the three tile rule or critiquing perfectly good maps. Seen from the outside, it was probably toxic, but we thought it was challenging everyone to do better.
Looking back at the Alex topic, I feel bad for being too critical or dismissive of some of the maps myself. A lot of it is frustration from playing the same maps repeatedly and having to fix them or get them to work together. I'm glad it's possible to preserve these unique events here and that people are still playing them. Maybe in 50 years from now someone somewhere will still be complaining about the long-ass factory map isithardcor3 contributed, struggling to solve the wrong math equation (can't remember if I ever fixed it or if I wanted to respect the creator's... vision), or admiring the brilliant starfox and casino maps... or maybe not!
Alex games were born out of my experience participating in some of the Gaming World Chain Games (also a cool series to check out), where people would disappear for months without any updates. The expectations of the Chain Game were high, and you had to incorporate other people's work with your own ideas. Alex was supposed to be more inviting and efficient in comparison. Just make a game in 1/3 days, how hard can it be? Even a single RTP map was encouraged.I remember directly asking many people on IRC to make a map for the first Alex. When that came out and turned out better than anyone expected, a lot of people wanted to be part of the second one. People were asking me instead of the other way around.
For better or worse, some people in the community were harsh and honest with their critique, and if you check some of the old screenshot topics you'll see people obsessing about the three tile rule or critiquing perfectly good maps. Seen from the outside, it was probably toxic, but we thought it was challenging everyone to do better.
Looking back at the Alex topic, I feel bad for being too critical or dismissive of some of the maps myself. A lot of it is frustration from playing the same maps repeatedly and having to fix them or get them to work together. I'm glad it's possible to preserve these unique events here and that people are still playing them. Maybe in 50 years from now someone somewhere will still be complaining about the long-ass factory map isithardcor3 contributed, struggling to solve the wrong math equation (can't remember if I ever fixed it or if I wanted to respect the creator's... vision), or admiring the brilliant starfox and casino maps... or maybe not!
ALEX IS: A Two-Day Collaborative Game Review
Thanks for the review! I agree that 3 is the better game, mostly for the reasons that LordBlueRouge mentioned. I asked people for more gameplay oriented maps and that helped this game a lot (I like Kazesui's puzzle submissions in particular), but there were less people involved and the community wasn't as active as it used to be.
One criticism of Alex games was that some maps would be too long or break the flow. It's not fun to get stuck on a difficult map when the spirit of these kind of games is to be able to see what everyone else contributed. The first game suffered from this (aside from a few choices to skip maps), and the second one usually had a skip button. I felt the skip button was also against the game's spirit because some people were skipping entire submissions because the mapping looked sparse or it used RTP. That's why I thought the world map could help by giving people some context and freedom without forcing them to play everything.
Now that I think about it, the reason this one went back to being a 2 day game instead of 3 was because some of the maps in 3 were so long and elaborate, that I worried it might discourage less experienced people from making smaller and simpler maps. These maps were nice to break the pacing in Alex 1, and by 3 people were trying very hard to impress others. It did result in a better game, but I also like the simplicity and randomness of some Alex 1 maps.
For this game I only contributed the intro, world map, and the ending (mostly a spoof of Hideo Kojima writing). That was good because in the other games I barely had time to work on my own submissions and they'd usually end up pretty boring.
One criticism of Alex games was that some maps would be too long or break the flow. It's not fun to get stuck on a difficult map when the spirit of these kind of games is to be able to see what everyone else contributed. The first game suffered from this (aside from a few choices to skip maps), and the second one usually had a skip button. I felt the skip button was also against the game's spirit because some people were skipping entire submissions because the mapping looked sparse or it used RTP. That's why I thought the world map could help by giving people some context and freedom without forcing them to play everything.
Now that I think about it, the reason this one went back to being a 2 day game instead of 3 was because some of the maps in 3 were so long and elaborate, that I worried it might discourage less experienced people from making smaller and simpler maps. These maps were nice to break the pacing in Alex 1, and by 3 people were trying very hard to impress others. It did result in a better game, but I also like the simplicity and randomness of some Alex 1 maps.
For this game I only contributed the intro, world map, and the ending (mostly a spoof of Hideo Kojima writing). That was good because in the other games I barely had time to work on my own submissions and they'd usually end up pretty boring.
ALEX III: A Three-Day Collaborative Game Review
Great reviews! Alex III is easily my favorite. A lot of prominent members of the community who didn't join in with the first Alex game were impressed by the result and everyone was asking for another Alex game. This is why it got so many submissions. I also think the extra day helped people deliver more polished results. Some people even shamelessly used their submissions to promote their own projects, but that's part of the charm as well. The Star Fox map is still one of the most impressive technical demonstration of what you can do in rm2k3 in my opinion.
I wasn't aware of the concept of game jams at the time, and I don't think it's something the community did back then, but the result is similar. We did have other concepts for community games, such as the Chain Game series (I recommend it, having participated in 2 or 3 of them), but Alex was different because people weren't aware of what others are working on. I'm still surprised how well it still works thematically.
Like iddalai said, ALEX II was skipped as a joke and also because participants had 3 days to complete their maps in III. The main requirement for submitting a map was to not use any of the default database stuff (so no battles or items) and to document where the entrances and teleports are (to make it easy for me to update the links to other maps).
I wasn't aware of the concept of game jams at the time, and I don't think it's something the community did back then, but the result is similar. We did have other concepts for community games, such as the Chain Game series (I recommend it, having participated in 2 or 3 of them), but Alex was different because people weren't aware of what others are working on. I'm still surprised how well it still works thematically.
Like iddalai said, ALEX II was skipped as a joke and also because participants had 3 days to complete their maps in III. The main requirement for submitting a map was to not use any of the default database stuff (so no battles or items) and to document where the entrances and teleports are (to make it easy for me to update the links to other maps).
ALEX: A Two-Day Collaborative Game Review
Thanks for the reviews! I was playing Alex a couple of years ago and was surprised by the general quality of some maps, so I ended up fixing some things and uploading them to RMN. I'm glad people were able to discover these games and appreciate the creativity of the community that made them.
These projects were a logistical nightmare, but very rewarding once you put them together. I actually like the factory map for example, but when I received it it had several game breaking bugs and was much more unforgiving (I replaced several game over screens with resetting sections). It was also quite long compared to most of the other maps, which breaks the flow. For future games this was mitigated by either a skip button or open world map design.
There are only 3 games (ALEX, ALEX III, and ALEX IS). There was a 4th one: ALEX JENQ, named after a member who made a much-hated map in ALEX IS consisting entirely of rap lyrics and no gameplay. Even though it got some very good submissions, the overall quality of maps was lacking (a trend that started with ALEX IS) as much of the community spirit was lost and people were moving on to other game engines or forums. Additionally, using the game title to make an inside joke about a member resulted in some mean-spirited and borderline racist submissions, so in retrospect it was a very stupid idea on my part.
These projects were a logistical nightmare, but very rewarding once you put them together. I actually like the factory map for example, but when I received it it had several game breaking bugs and was much more unforgiving (I replaced several game over screens with resetting sections). It was also quite long compared to most of the other maps, which breaks the flow. For future games this was mitigated by either a skip button or open world map design.
There are only 3 games (ALEX, ALEX III, and ALEX IS). There was a 4th one: ALEX JENQ, named after a member who made a much-hated map in ALEX IS consisting entirely of rap lyrics and no gameplay. Even though it got some very good submissions, the overall quality of maps was lacking (a trend that started with ALEX IS) as much of the community spirit was lost and people were moving on to other game engines or forums. Additionally, using the game title to make an inside joke about a member resulted in some mean-spirited and borderline racist submissions, so in retrospect it was a very stupid idea on my part.
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