Congratulations to the winners in the Meta Horizon Creator Competition: Open Source Champions

Here's literally the first file I opened from a FOUR-prize winner's remixable world with identifying information redacted. This is open source and thus subject to scrutiny, especially given that work of this caliber earned life-changing money whereas some of us who put real effort into our projects paid dearly for the privilege of waiting.

This single drop of code has:

- Unused imports
- Commented out imports
- Commented out code from a previous refactor
- A function (filterOutNonHumanEntityOwners) that isn't even used anywhere in the codebase.

The rest of the codebase is riddled with similar issues. Here are helpers that replace basic functionality that already exists on the Vec3 class, and which, of course, are not actually used anywhere.

This isn't pedantic. TypeScript was supposed to be a central part of this challenge and this is the type of code that sweeps the entire competition. It's not just unclean code, it's ultimately going to be confusing to remixers. 

 It is dreadfully obvious that ZERO attention was paid to how re-usable the code actually is. 

LNATIONDEV​ 

Thanks for this. I don't begrudge anyone for winning as it's not their decision, least of which people like you who put genuine effort and thought into their submissions and who are qualified to teach people tech. Looking at your tutorial, you've also broken up code into bite-sized chunks and explained each in agonizing detail, which is required for actual knowledge transfer. 

Hell, you even won the tutorial category that I didn't. Admittedly, I'm a little annoyed (not at you) that you edged me out, because the category was expressly "Best NPC enemy wave tutorial" and the word "wave" doesn't appear in yours. 

Again, please don't misunderstand. What you did was completely logical and, as it turns out, the right move. But had I known that I could write a tutorial about anything NPC-related, I would have absolutely killed this challenge by demonstrating how I implement generic state machines to very cleanly delineate behavior. I mean ffs, in my tutorial clips, I show animated robots running up and biting things or firing mortars. My tutorial doesn't show how to do that because that would be an obnoxious amount of cognitive load on a reader if presented along with a wave system. Keeping enemy behavior agnostic makes the most sense IMO, because it's the lowest common denominator that helps the most people. 

$5,000 isn't going to make or break me. But being in the Partner club is required for any serious success here and it's never going to happen for me. 

Anyway, enough said. Congratulations on your Partnership --you're golden now. You, at least, deserve it. 

I completely agree. Personally, I didn’t participate in the competition because I still don’t have the necessary knowledge on the platform. I was hoping to see prizes that would help me create games the way I want, like a shooter. Most of the prizes are really good and well-deserved, but there are others I’ve tried that are broken games with console errors I don’t know how to fix. Also, for some reason, many of the awarded games are related to the Obby genre. This is a multi-genre competition, yet that genre seems to be the most rewarded.

Regarding the prize distribution, it looks pretty suspicious. Some people won prizes with their remixable game, and from that game, they created packages that also won prizes. It makes you think the competition might have been rigged.

I won’t lie, I haven’t read all the clauses, but supposedly the competition was for remixable games. When you say “game,” it means a full game, not just a template. I also don’t understand how templates won over games made with complete mechanics and environments.

A personal opinion of mine is that I don’t understand why there are community-voted prizes. There’s also no transparency regarding the number of votes, so we don’t know how many votes each game received. It would be better to divide that amount into smaller prizes and give them to games with potential, almost like funding for creators. The next competition will have two prizes of $50K each, totaling $100K. It might be better to give smaller prizes of $5K or $10K to games with potential that didn’t win in any category to help fund the creators.

As I said at the beginning, I’m not trying to discredit any game, asset, or tutorial, but it’s clear that this hasn’t been a fair competition. Some creators have taken multiple prizes while very good projects haven’t won anything. Personally, I had to look outside of the Devpost prizes for remixable games that were more shooter-oriented.

I want to emphasize that more transparency is needed regarding the votes each game received. Otherwise, the most community-voted games could be rigged, and the system doesn’t help smaller creators at all. A big creator with a strong community can win by doing almost anything.