Forge Jam 2022 Results

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Announcements

First, i’d like to apologise; making this announcement took a long time because of factors outside the control of the team.
I’d also like to thank you all. The community helped get together to replace broken hardware in an amazing move of solidarity, and now work can continue as planned.
That aside, let’s have a refresh on what the Forge Jam was:

The Jam

For those who do not already know, a modding jam is an event that happens occasionally in the Modded Minecraft community.
The goal is to create a mod in a restricted time window, with a restricted theme and with specific judging criteria.

We judged based on 3 main criteria:

  • Creativity: how unique the idea of the mod is (whether it has not been seen before, or in other submitted mods)
  • Effectiveness: how well the mod works at transporting items
  • Theming: how well the mod sticks to the theme of Minecraft (or itself, should your mod focus around steam-punk airships or something.)

There were also two “bonus points” categories:

  • Performance: how well optimised your mod is, and whether it greatly affects frametimes or tick times.
  • Compatibility: whether your mod works in large packs, has mod integrations, and doesn’t use things like Coremods or Mixins.

We had an outstanding number of submissions for our first major event, and the community feedback was incredible. We’ll definitely do this again, and we’re looking to go bigger and better.

The Results

As mentioned in the extended description, the top 3 winners were:

  • Antsportation (authors: matyrobbrt, itskillerluc, Learwin)
  • SkulkTransporting (authors: bl4ckscor3, Redstone_Dubstep)
  • Railgun Transport (author: PlatinPython)

The Antsportation team was awarded $100, the Skulk team $50 and the Railgun team $25.

We had intended to provide some physical prizes this year, but many things conspired against us to make that painful.

Lessons Learned

In the interest of transparency, i’m going to lay out what we learned from this Jam, and how we’re going to improve for our next.

Communication

My communication on the wider-public announcements was not as clear as it could have been; to someone that was not in the Forge Discord server to see where I elaborated on the rules, it seemed like there were no version restrictions on submissions. This led to at least one mod being submitted for the version 1.4.7.

I’m going to try to put as much detail in the public posts as possible next time, editing posts where necessary to add information that I missed. Hopefully we can also close some loopholes this way :P

Submissions

We planned to have a submission portal this year hosted on our own servers; where you fill in a small form and it pings a webhook with the detail; this would have allowed us to create a backend for easier judging and monitoring of submissions.
Unfortunately, aforementioned universal conspiring made that idea die on the doorstep, and the only backup we had before the submission opening time was Google Forms.
A few people (correctly) submitted concerns about our use of the Google Forms service for this, and we’re going to make and test the next submission system well before the next Jam, to make sure the systems we need are in place before it’s made user-facing.

Judging

Judging this year was done by three members of the team with the final order determined by community vote.
However, two of the aforementioned three members were unable to properly start the game in order to playtest!
We’re going to open up judging to the rest of the Forge team for next year, to make sure we get as many playtests and as many opinions as possible.

Wrapping it up

I hope that with all these changes made, the next Jam (with a more restrictive category!) can be a smoother, more entertaining and more fun event for all of us.