There are several things going through my mind regarding the 'next' contest.
There has been one very drastic change regarding the state of the game and the forums since these contests started happening back in Spring 2018 - Bannerlord now has an officially confirmed release date.
Part of me believes that making any further contests(and content that gets created with the contests) for Warband is mostly in vain considering it is now nine years old and BL releases in four months. Yes, people will still be modding Warband for many years to come but the action will inevitably switch to Bannerlord. On the other hand, Bannerlord won't have available modding tools during all of 2020 which puts the whole thing in a very weird spot.
Now that's not to say that the main reason for the contests was people generating 'free' OSP content for everyone, it was a great side effect and certainly helped cultivating the open source approach to Warband modding as well as building up more assets for use in various projects. The main goal, after all, was the modding community revitalization after a long slumber and making community events for everyone to participate in and talk about.
There are only two contests that I would find viable these days:
So as you can see, I'm not entirely certain of what's next yet. This contest was a gigantic one and it was a real pleasure, but also quite the time investment from all parties involved. My current plan is to take a short break until January. We can use that time to gather feedback(here, or in PMs) about what I wrote above, check interest in another contest, ideas and suggestions. Then we can evaluate the state of things and see how Bannerlord is moving to its release goal.
There has been one very drastic change regarding the state of the game and the forums since these contests started happening back in Spring 2018 - Bannerlord now has an officially confirmed release date.
Part of me believes that making any further contests(and content that gets created with the contests) for Warband is mostly in vain considering it is now nine years old and BL releases in four months. Yes, people will still be modding Warband for many years to come but the action will inevitably switch to Bannerlord. On the other hand, Bannerlord won't have available modding tools during all of 2020 which puts the whole thing in a very weird spot.
Now that's not to say that the main reason for the contests was people generating 'free' OSP content for everyone, it was a great side effect and certainly helped cultivating the open source approach to Warband modding as well as building up more assets for use in various projects. The main goal, after all, was the modding community revitalization after a long slumber and making community events for everyone to participate in and talk about.
There are only two contests that I would find viable these days:
- Scening - it has by far the most participants and I think(anecdotally) that sceners are the most represented in the community. We can't do anything scener related for BL yet, and as I mentioned above doing it for Warband is still something I'm not 100% sure would be the best idea.
- 3D Art - 3D Art contests have had a decent number of participants. I would much prefer making 3D Art contests aimed at Bannerlord. It uses a much more modern approach. However, we know very little about the maps used in BL, nor will we have a way to test submissions in-game until there are some modding tools available.
So as you can see, I'm not entirely certain of what's next yet. This contest was a gigantic one and it was a real pleasure, but also quite the time investment from all parties involved. My current plan is to take a short break until January. We can use that time to gather feedback(here, or in PMs) about what I wrote above, check interest in another contest, ideas and suggestions. Then we can evaluate the state of things and see how Bannerlord is moving to its release goal.