Meet the Judges

[Lampworker]

Hello there everyone interested in the PSP Genesis Competition. If you are a developer or user of homebrew, this certainly should be an exciting competition all around! Apart from being the biggest competition in the history of the PSP scene, we wanted to make sure it had something more. We wanted to make sure it felt personal! In this thread, the judges will introduce themselves, and personally give you an idea of what type of homebrew they use/like/enjoy.

Knowing the judges will not only give you an idea of who we are, but may just give you an edge. Either in being a developer working towards the competition, or a user looking forward to the brew itself.

So without further ado, I'll start with the introductions:

I suppose I could be called the wild card judge in this competition. Unlike the other judges who get their hands dirty with code, I am not a developer. Sure, I've been around the PSP hacking scene for a long time, but chances are many of you have never heard of me or know who I am.

I like to think of myself as a teacher. Everyone starts somewhere I like to say. One thing there is never much of a shortage of is people new to scene. Most of the time, these people get a bad rap - and sometimes they deserve it. Failing to read a readme, or not trying to google, or asking the same question that's been asked a million times... is enough to drive anyone nuts. However, I feel it's important to educate these people as best as possible. Teach them how something works, and hopefully you have given them motivation to do better in the future. That's who I've tried to be - the person that connects the developers hard work, to the new users.

For the entire PSP scene, I've been able to say that I've played more homebrew than official games. It's been such a fun run! I bought my first PSP with the predetermined intention of running homebrew on it. I wasn't disappointed and it just keeps on getting better! Without a doubt there's one word for me in terms of games: Replayablity. That also relates to my preferred difficulty level: Hard. Difficult achievements, level editors, add ons, etc. If the game itself can grow through the users themselves, you are certainly on to something.

With applications, ease of use for the users is key. An application by nature is meant to serve a function and I respect that. However, many applications do a great job and are under used, due to the fact that people find them difficult to work with or understand in general.

Personal highlights for me may involve but are not limited to:
Playing on official firmware. That's just neat!
Ad-hoc (SOOO underused.)
A GOOD readme. I know, I know, few people read them, but make it worth reading and you may stand a greater chance!

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[Lampworker]

Please note that not all judges may be quick with posting in this topic. However, feel free to ask questions in general or to specific judges and we'll respond if and when we're available. Don't expect any secret details or any upper hand in the context though, that's just silly!

npt also said he will be monitoring this topic discussion and will assist in getting into contact with people if necessary.

A big good luck to everyone involved!

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[Pihas]

Ad-hoc (SOOO underused.)

And what about Infrastructure? It uses only one homebrew as far as I know. I need a good example of it :/ I have Virtual privat host, no problems for hosting such thing as master server an so on, but I have no clue how correctly make it.

[wololo]

I'm wololo. I bought my first PSP in 2006, and cried when I learned it was a ta82 (the doomed motherboard at that time). I was a huge user of Noobz' eLoader, and eventually came the HEN and CFW for everyone, back in 2007.
I enjoyed lots of homebrews, mostly scumVM and gpsp at that time, but also spent lots of time on bugz, defense station portable, spider solitaire, and loved some plugins such as the music plugin.

After a while I decided to create my own homebrew. I was strongly inspired by the possibility to customize defense station portable, the possibility to create one's own units and maps... I was also enjoying the casuality of spider solitaire... so I decided to come up with a game that would have minimal graphics (I'm not a designer), be casual enough, but customizable enough so that people could create their own stuff to improve replayability. Magic the Gathering came quickly to my mind as a nice way of achieving all this, and this is how Wagic was born, after 14 months of work the first beta was released.

As wagic was growing, my interest (and knowledge) for the internals of the PSP grew as well, and I gave myself the goal to help as much as I could with PSP3000 hacking, in order to have Wagic running on as many platforms as possible. I was only a minor element of PSP3000 hacking, but got enough knowledge out of this to start writing tutorials about PSP security, which eventually led to the patapon exploit, and the port of HBL to this exploit.

As a result of HBL's popularity, I now spend most of my free time handling this website. I barely have the time to focus on dev, either on HBL or Wagic (apologies to all the cool devs involved in these two awesome projects, I swear I want to be more involved).

Being part of this contest is one of my ways of saying "thank you" to the community. From an egotistical point of view, I'm rooting for casual games that are not completely brainless. I'm thinking turn-based strategy, tactical RPG, or even small casual games that can be easily extended. If you come up with a clever game (think strategy, not action... I'd rather use my brain than my fingers, this is why I love "turn based") , that allows players to create their own scenario/universe/units/whatever, your project will definitely get my interest.

A Homebrew doesn't have to be perfect from the start. I love people who have one project and keep improving it. Even if I'm not a big fan of action, I love games such as CSPSP or Mobile Assault, because the teams behind it are dedicated to offer a good playing experience, and keep improving their babies. The way to reach such a status: build the game you would want to play. Not something you do "just for fun" and that you will not play after you release it. Build the game for you, not for the others. Start small, make something that's enjoyable even if your dungeon only has one monster. Make your code maintainable so that you will easily improve your code with time. Be realistic in your initial goals, start small, but think big. don't think your game will stop after this competition. Who knows, next thing you know, you're porting it to the android market, and it becomes a source of revenue for you.

I believe 3 months is good to build a good simple game/application, showing lots of potential. This is what I'm expecting from this competition.

[Lampworker]

Ad-hoc (SOOO underused.)

And what about Infrastructure? It uses only one homebrew as far as I know. I need a good example of it :/ I have Virtual privat host, no problems for hosting such thing as master server an so on, but I have no clue how correctly make it.

Infrastructure would surely be impressive as well. From the history of the homebrew scene, I agree it's also underused. It just requires a lot more organization in my opinion and has a more limited lifespan. Ad-hoc will work with two people and two psp's without any other catches (well the ability to run the brew in the first place I suppose). When you are talking about hosting, the hosting has to stay alive at the very least. If a brew using infrastructure grows to be massively popular the hosting costs surely grow with it.

I'm not trying to dismiss the idea at all! I just see it as more of an undertaking than ad-hoc would be. I'd love to see something with infrastructure entered though.

[Hellcat]

Hi there.

I am "Hellcat" (as you might have spotted already on this posts header ) and I'll be your judging nightmare this compo
Nah, kidding, no nightmares

Well, about me.... I got my first PSP at the EU launch day, Sep. 1st, 2005 (was it in 2005? EU launch? I think it was, if not, correct me), it was on 1.52 at that time, I eventually updated to 2.00 to play GTA.... and then the first 1.50 downgrader came
And yes, by now I own and love the PSPgo!

Coding for most of my sentient life it was only a matter of time until I ended up installing the PS2DEV PSPSDK and I eventually made a few tools/apps, none of them used real graphics though, only debug text

And I love cats!


So, chances for my personal favs?
Hmm....
- I like eyecandyness
- I like "techy" stuff
- I like *usefull* apps
- I like things I just forgot to mention but will do so in later replies

Keep the good stuff comming!

[npt]

Hello all,
This is npt, as you most likely noticed by the posting header. I have been into the console scene since the 16 bit era... ahh, SNES, trainers, intros, cracks, demos... the good old days. Well, I'd say the good old days but frankly I think that the PSP scene is the best videogame scene we've ever had. I LOVE my psp (err, psps... no I will not admit out loud the # of psps I own... Hellcat, quiet now... :] ) and I have always used it more for homebrew than for games. Of course there are games I like but... we are here for homebrew, yes?

I decided I'd write a little thing up in here as though I am not a judge I did decide a while back that putting together a nice big competition, encompassing the whole scene, not run by one guy, or one website, would be really cool. Sure I got the ball rolling here, but now we are seeing one of the largest prizes I have ever seen in a console competition. I do hope that we see people pushing the boundaries here, and doing justice to the *incredible* prizes that we have from all of our wonderful sponsors. I've heard of some *amazing* sounding entries that I can only hope do end up being entered. I do believe that I've picked a good mix of judges, and that this will be a very fair competition.

I would very much like to see boundaries pushed here as far as they can be. I am so very pleased to see the good reaction to this competition. I cannot wait to see the entries start arriving! Waiting will be so hard, but worth it. Anyhow, I imagine there is a lot of coding / designing going on at the moment. Keep it up folks, there is a lot to be had here, and I would absolutely love to see some serious "out of the box" thinking. There *so much* left to be done to our PSPs, and run on our PSPs. Also, remember, make use of the time you are being offered. There is a reason we gave the amount of time we did.

Regards,

npt