ZDoom

Greetings, everyone!

There have been talks on ZDoom's Discord server regarding our very own ZDoom-oriented awards. Well, here they are.

What are the ZAwards?

The ZAwards are ZDoom's take at Cacowards. They are exclusively for projects posted on the ZDoom forums, and would be issued every year on ZDoom's birthday.

How many awards are there?

Awards are handed out on a case-by-case basis where no award is limited by any number of slots. Instead, each category can have up to 5 winners in it. This is to reduce specifics. It has been pointed out to us by members that we simply do not have enough contributions to limit our pool so much.

What are the criteria?

• Must not have won previous ZAwards. Cacowards do not count.
• Project thread must be posted on the ZDoom Forums.
• Project must have reached the state of being more or less complete within a year since the last award. "More or less complete" means it's past a certain point where it's deemed playable, even if it keeps getting updated regularly afterwards. Big, old mods are excluded from this. They're handled separately.
• Projects for the first iteration of ZAwards are not constrained by time!

How would you pick what wins?

Plans are to grab a certain number of items from each category and judge those, awarding the winners with a variable number of awards.

What are the awards themselves?

Similarly to the Cacowards, they are purely fame and glory. If everything goes according to plan, winners would get a highlight on ZDoom.org in a special ZAwards section. Custom military-like ribbons would indicate what sort of award each mod, map, or person has won. Yes, that means stuff you make can win more than one award!

Contacts

If you wish to contact the staff or discuss the awards, we have a server set up for that. Remember to read the rules!

LINK TO JOIN: https://discord.gg/BhD5GcN

The awards committee, by intent, is not the same as the current ZDoom staff, however to throw some "officiality" behind it I am going to support this. And thus, I moved it here.

Are cacoward winners discounted? Merely curious.

Nope. Only previous winners of ZAwards. I might as well update the thread with the criteria.

These by the way are not intended to be a replacement or displacement for Cacowards - the Cacowards committee has their own preferences and they are more focused on the Doom community at large - this committee is just being formed as a "Second Opinion" of sorts, mostly, but focused on the ZDoom community itself (whether the projects are on ZDoom or not).

Correct. Also added a link to the screenshot of the different awards. Most the names are set in stone. Still, if you have any suggestions, please let me know.

I assume I can't join the server just because I want to see how the discussion's going? I don't have much to contribute.

Sure you can. There aren't many channels, though, and most of the real discussion happens privately. Still, feel free to join.

Based on the ZDF Discord conversations that led up to this (primarily all the handwringing about how the Cacowards aren't really serving the best interests of this little fraction of a larger community), I'm honestly surprised that there isn't an explicit "NO LILITHS ALLOWED" rule.

I think you're really limiting the kinds of mods that will win awards with such limited categories. Wouldn't it be better to award 4 or 5 per project category or something? I really like the idea of this, there's a lot of people and projects overlooked by the cacowards but I think you really need to refine the categories first. The overspecificness here might cause you to overlook things just as much as the cacowards do.

Yeah, there's really not a lot of thought put into the categories. Like, at all.

Roman Architect
(Most Detailed Map)

Isn't this just the Torm award for Torm and nobody else? It also seems to discard the whole "not running like shit" side of making things look good. Might as well be "Most threads asking for extreme new culling mechanisms so their open-world maps run at more than 3 seconds-per-frame".

Recycler
(Most reused assets in an original way)

This almost seems to be discouraging the development of original resources. Why even bother, right?

Platinum Vinyl
(Best Music Pack)

How many music packs are even released here per year? One? Probably less, if you average it out. And how many of them are original instead of existing-music-randomizers or covers of the Doom soundtrack?

Keksimus Maximus
(Best Joke Wad)

This will run into the same problem as the Mockaward did, in that there'll be years where there are basically no candidates.

Back to the blackboard. Keksimus Maximus has been removed, Recycler got renamed to something more practical (details on that later), Platinum Vinyl is in consideration (probably gonna get axed), and Roman Architect's description will likely get redesigned.

tl;dr NONE of this is final, so don't treat it as final. Awards and criteria will be adjusted according to user feedback, just give us some time. I'll say when things are final.

OP updated. "Thank you" to everyone who gave us constructive criticism on which we based the decision to reform how the awards work.

could projects that aren't completed but have something a demo that's near the final product could be at ZAwards?

Nope. Must be finished or it doesn't qualify. "Near the final product" is too subjective.