Game Cup Season 1: Behind the Scenes

Our debut season was a thrilling pilot run, but it wasn’t without its hiccups. In this blog post, we’ll dive into the challenges we faced, the feedback we received from participants and the community, and the improvements we’re planning for the second season of the Game Cup.

The Game Cup marked the first competition we organized as the Space Chunks team. Back then, as a three-person team, we managed everything on our own — from organization and infrastructure to participant communication and even our public presence. Looking back, we’re proud of how our first season turned out. However, there are many things we would approach differently today.

The Beginning of the Journey and the Challenge Ahead

Going public with Space Chunks was never part of the original plan — it was meant to stay within a close circle. However, in April, we came up with the idea to open the Game Cup to all developers and designers. With limited time and most potential participants only available during the summer holidays, we had just two months to create an entire brand and organize the Game Cup. This involved recruiting teams, planning the event structure, setting up prizes, and building a server for game testing and the competition’s test environment. On top of that, we had to make Space Chunks known to attract more applicants to the Game Cup. For our then three-person team, it was a significant challenge.

The Teams

The Game Cup thrives on its participating teams — we understood that from the very beginning. Weeks before the event, we started actively recruiting teams. In addition to our efforts, several teams applied for the Game Cup on their own. Overall, the interest was remarkable.

Unfortunately, some highly ambitious teams with great potential canceled at the last minute, resulting in fewer teams than originally planned. As a result, we had to form two teams from Space Chunks to fill the gaps. This led to a major discussion: how should we handle the evaluation and prize money if one of our Space Chunks team members' teams wins? Our solution was to have all participants evaluate each other's games, and the prize money would be partially awarded to the team that placed second, with the remaining portion donated to charity.

As the Game Cup kicked off and teams began working on their games, unfortunately, more teams dropped out. Some left due to lack of motivation, time constraints, or critical errors in their development. Only four out of the seven planned minigames were completed.

For the next seasons, we need to focus on two key changes: First, we must increase the visibility of the Game Cup to attract more talented individuals, ensuring more applications. Second, we need to improve the selection process so that, when forming teams, we can be confident that the teams will be able to deliver a finished minigame. Don’t worry, we won’t be implementing a complicated application process. It will remain simple and straightforward as before.

The Game Cup Server and Infrastructure

In order for participants to test their minigames with an audience and for us to play all the minigames together during the grand finale, we needed a Game Cup server. When our Game Cup server went live, we received great feedback from all of you. Many of you loved the lobby with our custom models, blocks, and inventories. We plan to keep this style in future seasons (and we might just level it up 😉). That said, we did spot a few things that didn’t quite go as planned:

• Delayed Release: We encountered issues with our infrastructure, and the time required to organize the Game Cup made it difficult for us to focus on the server setup. As a result, the Game Cup server went live a few days later than initially planned.
• Queue Issues: The queue wasn’t behaving as expected during the first few days, which made testing the games a bit tricky for the teams. However, after a few days, the queue was up and running smoothly again.
• Test Environment for Teams: Our solution was to have the teams commit their minigames, worlds, and configurations to a GitHub repository, which would then be automatically deployed to our infrastructure. However, we didn’t anticipate that this approach would prevent the teams from reading logs, making it impossible to troubleshoot issues effectively.

Now that we’ve wrapped up the first season of the Game Cup and most things ran smoothly towards the end, we’ve already completed a large portion of the systems for the second season. For the upcoming season, we will fundamentally change the test environment for the teams and spend several weeks thoroughly testing our infrastructure.

The Evaluation and the Grand Finale

One major point of feedback from the participants was the game evaluation. Due to the limited time we had for organizing the Game Cup, we weren’t able to assemble a jury. As a result, our alternative solution was to have both the community vote through a user poll and the participants rate each other's games in various categories using stars. We then weighted these scores internally. At the end, the individual ratings from participants were made public to encourage transparency and fairness in the evaluation process.

For the second season, we plan to completely overhaul the evaluation system. More detailed information will be provided during the announcement of the second season.

About Game Cup Season 2

Right after the first season, we began planning for the second season. We want to take the time to thoroughly test everything and revise our structures. The next season of the Game Cup is expected to take place sometime in 2025.

Here are a few things you can expect from the second season:

• New Test Environment: Teams will have access to logs at all times and can easily configure their minigames.
• Completely New Evaluation System: Ensuring fairness by outsourcing the evaluation process.
• More Transparent Communication: Better communication with both the teams and the community.
• Huge Hype: The competition is going bigger, sparking more excitement among both viewers and teams. (Let’s just say things are about to heat up!)

Closing Thoughts

The Game Cup was an exciting journey for us, and we know many of you felt the same! We’ve learned so much and can’t wait to take the competition to a whole new level next year. If you don’t want to miss out on anything related to the Game Cup or if you want to apply for the second season, join our Community Discord server. If you’re interested in partnering with us or helping out with organizing as a team member, just hit us up on Discord or through our contact form.

Want to know how Game Cup Season 1 went and see which minigames were created? Check out the full article here.

A huge thanks to all the participants and viewers. Stay tuned—exciting things are on the way!