Game Chef 2009 will start on Monday, Aug 31.  This should allow folks to finish and submit whatever they're doing for Jake's contest.

The weekend before, Aug 29-30, I will release info about the structure of the contest, but not the ingredients or theme.

Game Chef 2009 will accept competed games on four different deadlines:

- Monday Sept 7 (one week later),
- Monday Sept 14 (two weeks later),
- Wednesday Sept 30 (the last day of the month), and
- right before the start of Game Chef 2010 (approx. one year later).

Participating chefs are encouraged to use these submission dates as milestones, interpreting them as they like (for example, I might do something like "basic playtest draft, revised draft, alpha, beta") and, furthermore, to resubmit games that have been significantly revised or improved between submission dates. Submitting games requires emailing me a link to a location where the game can be downloaded or purchased (yes, you can sell your GC games if you want, that's none of my business, though I don't necessarily suggest it, especially before the One Year deadline).

Note that, of course, you can just submit your game once and walk away.  There's no need to continue to develop a game that you may or may not be fully invested in, but some very vague structure will exist for those who do want to continue after the first week or two.

Cheers!  I will post more details on the structure of the contest and link to the new website as we get closer to the start date.

Hey Folks,

The new website for Game Chef 2009 is now live, including details on how to participate in the social, community aspects of the challenge. The actual theme, ingredients, and submission guidelines will be posted late tomorrow night, when the contest gets fully under weigh, though there are some hints in the new site design.

http://gamechef.wordpress.com/

Enjoy and feel free to ask any questions here or, better yet, in the comments on the website where everyone can see them.

Best,
Jonathan

You're putting a lot of work to this Jonathan, I for one appreciate it greatly. I especially like your history section. (Missing Little Game Chef from last spring, but perhaps it's not a real one?)

I'm also very excited of a new format, whether it sits well with me personally or not. On the one hand I'm happy with losing the extra forums (which basically seem to be too much of a hurdle for me when it comes to actually participating), on the other I'm not so sure about emphasizing long-term development in a competition that has always had its greatest strength in quick, innovative design. I hope you'll be making some noise when the secondary deadlines roll around, so as to encourage people to care about them. Could be that they'll work as a replacement for the judging, which I always found my favourite part of this contest.

A question: is it possible to give you a category on an existing blog instead of a whole new blog dedicated to this thing? I personally find it cluttersome to start a new blog for something as epheremal as this, however stupid that is with free bits and bytes. A personal aesthetic issue, that.

Hey Eero,

Rethinking things again, a category on an existing blog does seem perfectly reasonable, since you can do category feeds now.  I'm a bit loathe to reintroduce that option, since a bunch of folks have already created new blogs and I do like the idea of Game Chef being something you start fresh on, not something that's simply an outgrowth of your existing stuff.  So here's the deal: since you asked specifically, sure, we can work something out.  However, I'd like to avoid that as a general rule, at least for this year.  We'll give this a try and, for next year, I'll consider doing the category thing as part of the general instructions.

Jonathan

Is there any way to distinguish between a blog and a blog category anyway? I mean, if I just submit the feed for benlehman.livejournal.com/gamechef, doesn't that just look to the RSS reader like its own blog?

yrs--
--Ben

Yup. There's no way for the aggregator to tell, I don't think, aside from maybe labeling it with the blog that it originally came from. Which means that folks wandering around your blog after discovering it through Game Chef might be like "WTF, pictures of kittens?" but I don't imagine that'll be a huge problem.  Still, I was also hoping to not privilege folks with long-running blogs too much, since they already have readership and may not need additional eyes on their design process.

The theme and ingredients are up.  So it's on like Donkey Kong.

Fantastic! I am intrigued. Very well done indeed.

- Frank

I've noticed the RSS feed on the game chef site has a bias against my blog.  As in it won't show up the posts on the feeds.  They seem to instead go straight to archives not even showing my post over the feed.  That's rather upsetting.

http://jtarkpalmerwritings.weebly.com/the-gamechef-blog.html

Hey Jonathan,

I honestly have no idea what's making your feed do that.  Here, for example, is its listing in the Combobulator:
http://plays-well.com/turk.png

...And that looks totally right to me, so I'm not sure why it's not aggregating your feed. Hmm.

Jonathan

Im going to make one more post on my blog and if it fails to show up as compared to posts that ahve been there a full day without going away I'll switch to a wordpress blog and get this straightened out.  I find that I'm valuing the actual social aspect of the contest more then any kind of reward I can derive from it and I'd like not to miss out.

Okie dokie I've just put up a nice big post before bed.  If it doesn't look like it's feeding through the aggregator I'm going to chalk this up to the consequences of using Weebly's blog stuff and switch over to Wordpress to see if that helps.  I'll check back in the morning to see.

Hey Jonathan,

I just put your feed through the feed validator at w3.org:

http://validator.w3.org/feed/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fjtarkpalmerwritings.weebly.com%2F1%2Ffeed

I'm far from an RSS expert, but I wouldn't be surprised if the Missing atom:link with rel="self" thing isn't problematic for the aggregator.

Paul

Paul wrote:
Hey Jonathan,

I just put your feed through the feed validator at w3.org:

http://validator.w3.org/feed/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fjtarkpalmerwritings.weebly.com%2F1%2Ffeed

I'm far from an RSS expert, but I wouldn't be surprised if the Missing atom:link with rel="self" thing isn't problematic for the aggregator.

Paul

I'm not familiar with Weebly. Is there a configuration option to specify your feed url?

Paul

I might be able to fix it via the advanced settings under the design tab.  Lemme copy/paste what I'm seeing so you can tell me what I need to be doing.

THIS IS THE HTML OF THE PAGE the first tab of th advanced setting.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" 
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
  <title>%%TITLE%%</title>
  <!--[if IE 7]>
      <style>
      p {
        line-height:20px;
        padding-bottom:0;
      }
      h1 {
        font-size:20px;
        font-weight:normal;
        color:#fff;
        padding-bottom:0;
      }
      h2 {
        font-size:16px;
        font-weight:normal;
        color:#999999;
        padding-bottom:0;
      }
      #navigation {
        float:left;
        background-color:#0a161b;
        width:948px;
        font-size:12px;
        color:#060e11;
        padding:16px 0px 0px 0px;
      }
      #navigation-links li {
        float:left;
        display:inline;
        font-size:1em;
        padding:0px 20px 10px 0px;
        border:1px solid red;
      }
    </style>
  <![endif]-->
</head>
<body>
  <div id="wrapper">
    <div id="sitename">%%TITLE%%</div>
    <div class="weebly_header"></div>
    <div id="navigation">%%MENU%%</div>
    <div id="content-wrapper">
      <div id="contents">
        %%CONTENT%%
      </div>
      <div id="footer">
        <div id="footer-contents">%%WEEBLYFOOTER%%<div>
      </div>
    </div>
  </div>
</body>
</html>

CSS

*|* {
  margin:0pt;
  padding:0pt;
}
body {
  background: transparent url(background.gif) repeat-x center top;
  background-color:#0d1216;
  font-family:Georgia,"times new roman",serif;
  font-size:13px;
  color:#4f7288;
  margin:0;
  padding:0;
}
p {
  line-height:1.5;
  padding-bottom:12px;
}
h1 {
  font-family:Georgia,"times new roman",serif;
  font-size:20px;
  font-weight:normal;
  color:#fff;
  line-height:1.5;
}
h2 {
  font-family:Georgia,"times new roman",serif;
  font-size:18px;
  font-weight:normal;
  color:#ffffff;
  line-height:1.5;
}
#wrapper {
  width:960px;
  margin:0pt auto;
}
#sitename {
  height:63px;
  width:960px;
  font-size:30px;
  color:#cccccc;
  font-weight:normal;
  padding-top:25px;
}
#content-wrapper {
  background:transparent url(content_background.jpg) repeat-x center top;
  float:left;
  width:960px;
  margin-top:9px;
  margin-right:0px;
  padding-bottom:25px;
}
#navigation {
  float:left;
  background-color:#0a161b;
  width:948px;
  font-size:12px;
  color:#060e11;
  padding:16px 0px 0 12px;
}
#navigation ul {
  float:left;
  padding:0 10px 0 0;
  margin-left:0;
}
#navigation li {
  float:left;
  display:inline;
  height:30px;
  font-size:1em;
  padding:0px 20px 6px 10px;
}
#navigation a:link  {
  color:#fff;
  text-decoration:none; 
}
#navigation a:hover  {
  color:#fff;
  text-decoration:none; 
}
#navigation a:visited  {
  color:#fff;
  text-decoration:none; 
}
#active a:link  {
  color:#63afde;
  text-decoration:none; 
}
#active a:hover {
  color:#63afde;
  text-decoration:none; 
}
#active a:visited {
  color:#63afde;
  text-decoration:none; 
}
a:link, a:hover, a:visited {
  color:#63afde;
  font-weight:normal;
  text-decoration:none;
}
.weebly_header {
  background:transparent url(%%HEADERIMG%%) no-repeat center top;
  float:left;
  width:960px;
  height:314px;
}
#contents {
  width:920px;
  min-height:500px;
  height:auto !important;
  height:500px;
  padding:20px;
}
#footer {
  float:left;
  width:960px;
  height:36px; 
  margin:20px 0 30px 0;
  background-color:#0c1c23;
}
#footer-contents {
  float:left;
  font-family:Georgia,"times new roman",serif;
  padding:11px 0px 0 20px;
  width:940px;
  height:28px;
}
input {
  background-color:#394c5b;
  border:1px solid #999;
  font-size:12px;
  color:#97c4e0;
}
textarea {
  background-color:#394c5b;
  border:1px solid #999;
  font-size:12px;
  color:#97c4e0;
}

div#commentArea div.blogCommentOwner {
  background: #323242;
  border: 1px solid #505060;
}

/****************************** flyout menus ******************************/

#weebly-menus .weebly-menu-wrap {
  z-index: 5000;
}

#weebly-menus .weebly-menu {
  padding: 0;
  margin: 0;
  list-style: none;
}

#weebly-menus .weebly-menu li {
  float: left;
  clear: left;
  width: 170px;
  text-align: left;
}

#weebly-menus .weebly-menu li a {
  position: relative;
  display: block;
  width: 100%;
  background: #2a3e4e;
  border-right: 1px solid #394c5b;
  border-left: 1px solid #394c5b;
  border-bottom: 1px solid #394c5b;
  text-decoration: none;
  font-size: 11px;
  font-weight: normal;
  line-height:1;
  padding:5px;
  color: #fff;
}

#weebly-menus .weebly-menu li a:hover {
  background: #2a3e4e;
}

#weebly-menus span.weebly-menu-title {
  display: block;
  padding: 5px 10px;
}

#weebly-menus span.weebly-menu-more {
  background: transparent url(http://images.weebly.com/weebly/images/submenu_arrow.gif) no-repeat center top;
  display: block;
  position: absolute;
  right: 5px;
  top: 0;
  font-family: Courier;
  height: 28px;
  line-height: 28px;
  padding:3px 0 3px 0;
}

This appears to let me manipulate the thtmeme though I still can't find a way to directly manipulate the HTML of a specific page.

Digging further I found a drag option to allow me to add custom HTML to a page.  So what custom HTML should I add to get this thing rolling?

You don't need to make changes to the html of the blog. I dunno man. The recommendation of the w3 feed validator is that your feed xml should have something like the following in the channel section:

<atom:link href="http://jtarkpalmerwritings.weebly.com/1/feed" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />

That's ok gmails being a bitch today so let's open a hotmail and wordpress account and go to town.

*sigh* No way to get into my gmail account as of yet so, gonna have a new wordpress blog and stuff going by the weekend so I can get this show on the road already.

Tark,

Take a deep breath.  This will all be okay.  Starting a game later than everybody else isn't a big deal.  I just added a couple new blogs to the feed yesterday.  You've got all the time in the world (at least until the end of the month).

The master list of Week One winners is up here, listing the 12 games that have been submitted so far and their medals in an easy-to-navigate chart.

Jonathan wrote:
The master list of Week One winners is up here, listing the 12 games that have been submitted so far and their medals in an easy-to-navigate chart.

Good suggestion, David.  I actually did it with the TITLE tag, which seems to work for more browsers than ALT.

Jonathan wrote: Good suggestion, David.  I actually did it with the TITLE tag, which seems to work for more browsers than ALT.

http://jmpalmersgamechefblog.wordpress.com/

Let's see if that works.