Creatures Caves

Ah, thanks for posting this up here Laura, and sorry for being a little slow on the uptake.

Okay, bear with me for a long post because I have a lot to respond to. Rather than repeat myself over and over again, to those of you who thanked me for putting together the CCSF and had no complaints or criticisms about it I will say thank you for your thank you, and I am glad to hear that you enjoyed this year's CCSF

Malkin wrote:
Perhaps people got confused with my breeding game and didn't upload any creatures to share because they thought they had to play the breeding game to share. Oh well.

Ghosthande wrote:
It might have just been due to a lack of people realizing that they could submit Creatures just like they'd submit any other kind of content.

I think that Ghosthande pretty much hit the nail on the head. There was a huge emphasis on proper releases and events, and in hindsight I should have tried to bring the focus back to creatures and TCR every now and then to remind people that they could (and would have been encouraged to) submit creatures to the TCR.

Malkin wrote:
I also liked that after I submitted stuff, 3kul always wrote me back a (very flattering) email to let me know it had arrived safely and that it was a fantastic release.

Regrettably I wasn't so quick to respond to everybody, and I had to be reminded by a few people to make sure that I had received their e-mails. In this respect my mistake was using my own personal e-mail account rather than creating a new account that would only receive CCSF submissions, as I had a little difficulty in keeping track of all my e-mails.

Malkin wrote:
I'm not sure what the effect of the pre-CCSF public calendar was (which was an innovation for this year) - in the early stages, it certainly inspired people to fill up the gaps, but once every day had something promised (not recieved, but just promised) I didn't feel as urgently that I had to contribute something, even though I know in my head that CCSF is always crying out for more releases.

Yeah, the aim of making a calendar public was essentially to encourage people to try and fill it in, which was my major concern to begin with. In addition to this though, I was also hoping to get people excited for releases from people that they knew, and also to emphasize that I was very flexible with my scheduling.

Initially I was worried that once the schedule seemed 'full' people might feel exactly the same way as you did Malkin, but for I reasons I still don't fully understand (perhaps simply because the CCSF was going well?) I received quite a few unscheduled releases towards the back end of the CCSF.

Malkin wrote:
This leads me to my next point - the insidious idea that something needs to be 'good enough' for CCSF.

Yes, I really hope that with this year's CCSF I've managed to help with getting rid of this horrible idea once and for all.

Just as Malkin says, polished releases are always fantastic to have, but this is a community festival, so any and all submissions from anybody within the community are welcome, there is absolutely no required level of quality or panel of judges or anything like that.

If you could see behind the scenes footage of how this year's CCSF worked, most of the time all you'd see would be me receiving an e-mail, saying "nice" (or something like that), then logging on to the CCSF site to schedule it in. That's really all there was to getting your content into this year's CCSF, people

Malkin wrote:
I was a bit disappointed in how the breeding game turned out - you were the only person who submitted an entrant to that.

Ah, I think that your problem here stemmed from your very early announcement that you already had a 'winner'. I was trying the breeding game myself, but after you announced that Ghosthande had won it (and in so few generations!) I kind of gave up because I thought that there was no way I could beat that

Perhaps next time save announcing the results until a later date, even if a winner immediately becomes obvious?

rainbowcat1 wrote:
That said, a community wolfling run, perhaps like the one Dreamnorn did a few months ago, would be fabulous!

Yeah, something like that would have been great to have, but unfortunately it seems that nobody was interested in doing it. Maybe you should give it a shot yourself for next year, rainbowcat1?

rainbowcat1 wrote:
I wish there could have been a unified CCSF forum, because some user are exclusive users of CT or CC, so we don't get to mingle much except during CCSF.

Ah, now this is interesting to hear, because I was quite opposed to the idea of a CCSF forum the whole way through.

My main concerns were that most people wouldn't want to have to register for and keep track of yet another forum because, as you point out, there are some people who don't even like to register for other CC sites.

I felt that the comments on the blog format made for a 'lite' and easy experience that many people could access without any problems or any real need to have a lengthy conversation in, and then if they wanted to discuss any particular release in detail then they'd be able to do so back at whatever CC forum they preferred.

However you do make quite a good point, especially with GW gone, in that a CCSF forum would serve as an excellent way of uniting the community for the CCSF. I guess both sides have their ups and downs, I'll be interested to see what people decide to go with next year.

Ghosthande wrote:
Perhaps for next year, there could be a list of ideas on submission types? ie. "Here's some suggestions... and anything else you can think up"? That would at least give people a starting point, and help them get a feel for the fact that more than just agents, breeds and metarooms can be submitted.

Malkin wrote:
I think Amaikokonut did a blog post about potential types of CCSF releases ages ago, but I'm not sure if that message of diversity was reiterated enough by 3kul in the leadup to the CCSF? It might have made it more 'official' if that had happened, maybe. :/

I didn't think that I'd need to explain to people what kinds of content they could submit, but unfortunately in hindsight it does look like I should have said a lot more than I did. Oh well, all we can do now is make a note of it for next year I suppose.

Thank you everybody for all of your feedback so far, it's been really fantastic to hear what you thought of this year's CCSF and very helpful to hear about the things that you felt could have been done better

Malkin wrote:
Even Fiona-ish reasons...

(Ah! Thanks for reminding me of this Malkin, I completely forgot that I meant to upload Fiona ages ago)