Now that the second Sponge Plugin Competition has concluded I wanted to take a moment to address feedback regarding them as well as announce the next competition start date.

Requirements

Here are the planned rules for future competitions. All plugins will be eligible for submission unless otherwise specified.

Must be your own code.

Must be a plugin for SpongeAPI (NMS and dependencies are allowed but it should be primarily SpongeAPI).

Must be a OSI-compliant license with a public-facing source repository.

Must be functional. Plugins that cannot run will be disqualified.

Must be compatible with the current release version of SpongeAPI.

Submission must not have won a Sponge Plugin Competition before.

Only one submission per person. If more than one submission is found by the same user then we will only use the last submission.

You must be 17+ or have signed approval from your parent/guardian.

Winner(s) will have 48 hours to reply from time of contact else a replacement will be chosen. A community vote may be held to help aid the choice in replacement.

Scoring

In the past we tried scoring every plugin based on several factors including code quality, uniqueness and creativity. Going forward Project Managers and above will vote on a plugin they feel deserves to win. Plugin with the highest votes will become the winner and second will be the runner-up. If there is a tie between any, a vote will be held with those two as the only option to break said tie.

Results for the internal vote will be published after the SoS that the winner(s) are announced in.

Reward

With the upcoming Sponge Plugin Competition we will be opening up the rewards a bit to extend in to the console realm.

Runner-Up: Will receive a $40 in value prize from the list below.

Winner: Will receive a $60 in value prize from the list below.

Prizes

You will have the choice between…

A reasonable amount of games (3 or less) totaling (before tax) up to the value of your prize from Steam, Origin, or GreenManGaming.

Gift card code matching the value of your prize for one of the following places: Nintendo eShop, PlayStation Store, Xbox Marketplace or GameStop.

Prize options are not guaranteed and are limited by the availability of the given prize at the time of collection.

Timeframe

We’re going to aim for future competitions to end around the time of a State of Sponge. Winners will be announced during the State of Sponge stream and will be contacted afterwards to receive their prize.

We want to give people time to do competitions so this is what we are planning for lengths…

Submissions: Submissions will be open for three months from start to finish.

Review: Three weeks will be allotted to reviewers to go through all submissions and grade them.

Winner: Winners will be announced during a State of Sponge and contacted afterwards.

It may seem like the Review period is a bit long but we want to ensure that reviews are properly done on each submission and not rushed.

With this in mind. We’re limiting the amount of competitions to two a year. A Summer and Winter competition.

Submissions

We plan to add support to Ore for marking a plugin as a competition entry. We’ll accept the last upload made before the deadline passes when judging.

In the event Ore support does not make it in time, we will continue with the current system we’ve used for submissions.

Ore Integration

We want to make it simple to submit your plugin. The idea is to add a ‘Submit to Competition Winter 2016’ button to the settings page of your project. Once submitted, pressing the button again will allow you to remove the plugin from the submission list.

Winners of a competition will have a badge on their project that shows [{Trophy #} {Season} {Year}]. So something like [1st Winter 2016].

Competitions will have their own sections in Ore. Something along the lines of /competition/2016/winter/.

With all that in mind let me state that while we would love to have this ready in time for the next competition but make no promises.

Sponge Plugin Competition - Summer 2016

The next competition will be held from June 30th 2016 until September 30th 2016.

Review will be held from October 1st through October 22nd and the winners will be announced during the State of Sponge on October 29th.