It's a $300 prize, so it requires a bit of effort to win. We have had tons of other giveaways (including an Xbox 360 premium package) that had completely random winners where all you had to do was leave a comment. We are trying to spark some creativity here. Plus, this isnt a TextPayMe Xbox 360 - this is one that we got on our own.

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I'll definitely try this; I am adequately experienced with OpenGL. Would you rather have an OpenGL based game, or more of a windowish game? (C#, for example.) Is there any "genre"or type of games that you would really enjoy to see :) ?

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Slashmire has already proven my point. While it will take some effort from him to make a good entry, his programming knowledge is certainly far beyond mine, and I find it highly unlikely that I would be able to craft a game superior to his. Andru, I certainly do recall the Xbox 360 Premium giveaway you had a while back. It was actually what made me become a regular reader of your site. However, you did not follow the recommendations I just made during that contest. All a person had to do was leave one comment in that article. As a result, hundreds (thousands?) of potential readers came to the site with the sole purpose of entering the contest. While a few like me may have stuck around, I think that the overwhelming majority left immediately afterwards, as is evidenced by the almost complete lack of comment or forum involvement at present. If you had required posting regularity in order to win (or some other method of getting people involved with the site instead of just entering once), you may have had far more readers as a result of that giveaway. Looking back on it, I think it was a good giveaway, but a lackluster tool to bring regular readers to the site. I am glad that you are trying hard to get people involved using giveaways, and I think it's great that you went out and bought a 360 just for this giveaway. However, your previous contests that did use a TextPayMe 360 (not including the initial one where a random person was called and won) have been just as unfriendly to the casual reader as this one is. You could simply be doing these giveaways out of the goodness of your heart (and you do seem to have a good heart, don't get me wrong), but I think that the main reason is that you want to increase readership (which is the main goal of most every blog out there). Doing a giveaway that caters to the elite programmers out there won't win you any casual readers. I understand that since this is a big giveaway the method of entry has to be more difficult, but there are other ways of making it difficult (see my previous post). I'll continue reading and enjoying your posts whether I win a 360 from you or not. I just don't want this impressive giveaway and others like it to reap little for the site.

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Heh, so basically you don't like the fact that I may be more skilled than you? (without anyone having shown any skills whatsoever) Looking at the traffic on the site, I can't say that thousand of people are posting and...we respectively have 47 and 13 posts...which isn't 5000 either. To tell the truth, I do believe in my programming skills, but trying to impose rules that no one should have skills is quite bizarre....maybe a minimum post count then? 50 or so?

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Yeah, I understand the concern, and have seen some forum contest that ended up like mentionned above; I totally agree on a 'post count' rule or any other things of the such, and I would assume that singling out the new people that came in just for the contest should be quite easy; for example the initial post was made on May 24th, yet the first reply came in on June 13th. I don't think anyone should worry about this contest being stolen at the last minute. Thinking about it, you could always end up disqualifying anyone who was not registered prior to the contest launch date. [edit] heh, looking at my registration date, I was registered couple of hours prior to the launch :lol: but no really, I woudn't mind any extra 'qualification' or 'requirements'...I just want to know if I should start a game :-S

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Since Andru didn't respond to you guys about the language to use, I was told that we could only use Visual Studio Express ... be it Visual C++, Visual C#, or Visual Basic. No real programming experience is necessary to enter since Microsoft has some great tutorials and the templates provide some starting place. Sure someone could write thousands and thousands of lines to try to win, but that doesn't mean that a beginer with a great idea for a fun and simple game with few lines of code can't take the prize. I say give it a shot, just stick to using Visual Studio Express, as this is the point of the contest.

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Ok good thanks, I have a nice idea that I'll rework using C++ and openGL...I'll have it by friday for sure :)

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Yeah, the one rule is you MUST MUST MUST use Visual Studio Express. That makes this easy. We are NOT looking for epic games with awesome graphics. I am looking for something interesting. For example - you can build a house. Or you can take 10 Jolly Ranchers and melt them together to form something weird looking. That would win, even though it took less skill. Seriously...give it a shot with Visual Studio Express. There are even templates that are ready made that you just need to EDIT! ;)

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