ASKidwai wrote:So how exactly was the judging decided? Did all the judges have a vote or a list and the common ones were selected?
We all had 3 weeks to play with the 111 entries, and come up with a list of our favorites.
I don't know how the other ones rated the entries, but I personally used the following criteria:
- Originality (Has this been already made? Has this been already made on the PSP ?)
- first impact and user interface (Does the game/app look cool / is easy to use / do I want to see more after the first 2 minutes ?)
- (When applicable) gfx and sound (are the graphics/sound original, and are they well made ?)
- Scene impact (partly gut feeling, also based on how many people support the homebrew, basically "will people remember this homebrew in 1 year ?". This is also where I added points if the entry was open source, as I believe it's a huge part of what makes a homebrew "supported" by the scene).
- replay value for games (customization, etc...) and usefulness for apps/plugins
Each one of those was attributed a note between 1 and 10.
I knew my criteria involved lots of "subjective" terms, so I ended up with a list of 28 brilliant homebrews (and even with that, there were still entries that I liked that got out of the list).
Thankfully, the other judges were more reasonnable, with lists of 5 or 10 entries.
Lamecraft and pro cfw were in almost all judges' top 3, so it was easy to say that they would end up on the podium. After roughly 30 minutes discussion, we agreed that they should be 1 and 2, and we had a vote to determine which one would be first, which one would be second.
We had much more disagreement on who would be 3rd, and that took an additional 1h to decide. All the entries had pros and cons... the plugins localizer and psp3d were a bit "niche" products, but were extremely original and useful. Shell demonstrated lots of work and involvement, but also had this feeling of "what if nobody supports it? It could dies tomorrow, so much work remains to be done for a single dev". Some1's downgrader was...well, it was a freaking Kernel exploit...we got what...1 per year? But appart from the genius of the exploit, not much "programming" meat...
So, yeah, I can say that 3rd position was a fight, not even mentioning that we were all trying to root for a few additional entries that were in our top 5, top 10, or top 28...