So, on the website there is a contest going where you can design a villain, and you could win... stuff.
I have a proposal, -someone-. I have a good idea for a villain -- a very unique and (I think) creative flip mechanic -- but I have literally no artistic abilities. If anyone wants to help, I'd appreciate having someone draw it for me. Other creative bits -- a name, appearance, more creative backstory -- would be greatly appreciated as well.
I really, really hope artistic ability isn't required as I have talent that approaches zero from the low side. I've settled for descriptions of the cards for my villains, you might want to try that.
I think they're probably going to be more interested in the interesting mechanics than the art as they probably want Adam to do all the art to ensure a consistent look for the expansion.
Oh, good luck with the villain, but not so good that you beat me. 
I doubt you really have to have your villian drawn out, though it may give a a bonus point. As long as the mechanic awesome plus a undepth detail story about the villian, it'd be peachy keen. Of course a detailed description of how the villian looks will probably also give the bonus point that a drawing would give.
I hope this contest means we get a sneak peek at the new villains...I'd hate to design something they already made
You *definitely* do not need to draw your villain for the contest. Adam will do all of the final art anyway :)
Is this contest getting in the way of villains >G made that were meant to be in the expansion? I mean, I love the fact that you guys are actually encouraging fan input into the game, but is this gonna get in the way of including a villain in Time & Space that you guys made? You could always make the fanmade villain a promo.
They said that they had three villains prepared for the expansion and were just opening things up for the fourth slot. So it doesn't seem like it's getting in the way of anything.
Alright, that's good then. Not that I'm not very excited to see what the fans can come up with. I'd like to see all the submissions that get sent in. Though what are they going to do about the nemesis factor? Will they have to make a whole new character to be the nemesis of whatever villain gets picked? I feel like they'd have to wait until the villain was chosen to make its nemesis. It'd be way harder (from a story perspective) to have a hero already on standby and then try and work up a reason why the two are nemeses. Or at least I feel like it might be.
Doesn't really have to have a nemesis, I would imagine. Just a villain-at-large, not tied to any one hero?
Or the nemesis could be an as-yet-unknown hero…
My understanding is that >G would take responsibility for turning the villain submission into a deck they are happy with, regardless of where the ideas came from or how much was in the submission and how much was crafted afterwards, the end result is a great deck.
Do we at least know whether this is for an established hero-villain Nemesis combo or a new hero? I want to craft some ideas, but that aspect of it seems pretty important. It would be a bit of a stretch to have Absolute Zero's begrudged time-travelling roommate from college be Bunker's Nemesis, after all.
Honestly, I would imagine that they are ready for that. They'll either 1) intertwine the backstory of your villain with the backstory of a hero they already have planned, or, I think most likely, they'll 2) craft a hero in the future who compliments your villain well. (Possibly with your input!) If they think your villain idea is better than theirs for a hero that doesn't have a nemesis yet, maybe they'll go with that. (But I doubt it.) That's if every villain needs to have a nemesis, which isn't guaranteed.
Nevertheless, we're supposed to learn all about it on Monday. I'm sure they'll address the nemesis issue then.
You know... if the kickstarter shipments had arrived on time my entry for this contest would probably have been very different, and not stepping on various toes spread around between IR and Ambuscade.
Oh well. It was still fun. :)
Heck, I have all the stuff and my submissions still ended up being closer to some of the existing villains than I realized just because I hadn't had a chance to play everything (and my group has played every meeting since I picked up the game). Hopefully the entries will be judged more on the concept and not specifically on the suggested mechanics.
Yeah, I have a couple of villain outlines but I'm waiting for the boxes to show up before I mail in my submissions for I fear some ideas I have might overlap. One is supernatural in nature, and the most recent expansion is almost entirely supernatural. The other is very much cosmic... which means they might already have a guy like him planned for the time expansion but I like the idea and will take my chances.
Either way what matters is that they are both villains I would love to face.
And of course, my awesome flip mechanic has been taken. By AMBUSCADE, of all villains. *grumble grumble*
I just sent mine in. I'm so glad I had a group of friends to help me with this. It's always vital for me to have someone around to look at and go "Is this good or stupid?"
Why does this always happen?! I've just noticed an error in my submission AFTER I sent the verdammt thing in!!! ARRRRRRGGGHHHH!!!!!
Just send a follow-up e-mail correcting the error. No big deal.
It's not like we've never made any mistakes. *quietly burns a stack of Infernal Relics rulebooks*
Last-minute inspiration has stuck. Second submission iincoming!
Soooo wanted to participate, but my ideas didn't fit the theme and time was not on my side. I'll have to hope there will be another opportunity.
Best of luck, everyone. I played against someone's submission tonight, and I have to say I was highly entertained! 
My friends and I considered how funny it would be if someone spent weeks coming up with ideas, putting together the perfect villain deck, playtesting it and getting everything just right, creating a masterpiece of gameplay, but then submitted it with the most absurd villain character anyone could possibly think of, just to give >G a hard dilemma, so they'd say "This deck is perfect, but the villain is ridiculous! What do we do?!"
But no one has that kind of time.
That sounds like a whole lot of extra work for this contest, IMO. I certainly didn't come up with each card in the deck and playtest and make it perfect before I sent in my email. I figure that's what the game designers will do. I gave an overview of what the villain is about and more importantly, how it would feel and how it would fit into the world. Then I gave examples of types of cards the villain would have (no gameplay details), and included my idea for the flip mechanic, since I figure that having a unique flip mechanic is a vital requirement for any new villain. But I definitely didn't try to hand them a 100% complete deck.
Guess we'll see if I completely misjudged the contest. ;)
I did about the same as Spiff did. Now I just want the contest to hurry up and be over with, so I can find out that I won't win sooner, heheh.
Now that I got to read all the new villains, I completely scrapped one (I'll post more about it after the 29th) and I'm working on my other submission. I might try to whip out a second villain if something really good comes to mind.
But yeah, I'm not balancing... I would like to make mine as short as possible but out of enthusiam it will be at least a page.
I went in completely the other direction. My entries included complete decks, descriptons of the art on each card, quotes for each card, backgrond, difficulty rating, the whole works. The only thing I left out, apart from the kitchen sink, was actual artwork because I can't draw for toffee. I figured give >G everything there is in your idea so they can see why it's so awesome they have to make it win. But I agree with theJayMann and want the results now so I can know rather than just suspect I didn't win.
Well, I do have one bonus point. Not only did I provide an illustration of the villian, that illustration was created by Adam himself.
that illustration was created by Adam himself.
No fair! You should disqualify yourself immediately. ;)
Unless that image is of Hippoman… then I demand that it wins!
I'm about to send my two submissions as five-page PDFs with a general explanation, profile similar to the what >G has created for each character on the website, and a full play-test deck for each.
I play-tested pretty extensively for one of my submissions and it now has most of its kinks worked out. Getting the mechanics to match the theme was a game in and of itself, and I had a tremendous time tweaking it at my kitchen table with my Enhanced Edition all week.
The other was a snap creation following a particularly inspired commute to work. It has not been play-tested at all, though I think it has a lot of promise. Regardless of the outcome of the contest, I look forward to poking holes in it.
I'm as excited to see everyone else's ideas as I am the results of the contest. Come October there's going to be a whole lot more villains running around the Multiverse. It was so cool of >G to run such a thing - not many companies are so supportive of the creativity of their customers (or should I say fanbase?).
I think they're expecting they'll get a variety of levels of submissions - from a high-level summary to full decks. I don't think any of these are right or wrong (in fact, I think the >G folks are going to appreciate the variety on this ).
The person I know whose villain we play tested is an actual game designer (actually has a published game and everything), so he's not the norm.
I'm really looking forward to the "Original Villain" thread that comes after this is over... Maybe they could even eventually publish more than one villain as stand alone $5 decks.
I almost dont want to submit a second villain because I'm so happy with my first... lets just say every game his flip effect is different and should produce a "holy #$%&" moment.
This
I went ahead and made a detailed backstory, and every card in the villain deck, which my friends and I playtested a few times. But I didn't go beyond that, so I guess I fall into the middle ground of effort. I suppose I could go through and make quotes for every card and make descriptions for all the artwork...
Oh wait, no I couldn't. That would require more creativity than I have. Kudos for the effort, Pwatson.
Heh. Thanks, but it wasn't effort, it was fun!
My first submission was the full works - Background, Character description, flip mechanic, deck theme, card effects, quotes, art description. No original art, cause I can't draw, but I lifted some images from a google search for illustrative purposes. I even put together an outline of a six-comic arc where the quotes come from and the villain makes their first appearance. Then I went overboard and wrote notes about the thoughts underlying the theme and mechanics, how I came up with the idea, etc.
My second submission I'm putting the finishing touches on now, but it's not as well developed. The idea for the character and some really new mechanics are there, and I've written out a deck which probably needs a lot of work, and is more a collection of ideas. I don't have as firm an idea of the villain's story and what happens in the battle as my first one, so any quotes and such that I have are more placeholders.
Im really looking forward to seeing everyone else's heroes once the winner has been announced. There has to be some crazy ideas out there!
Remembered a character who I created a long time ago, I came up with a couple of new card types and yeah... I think I will go for the gold and submit one more depending on how busy things are at work today. It will be another "zero numbers" submission because as I said in my butt kissing email with the first submission: I trust you guys with game design.
No, really, it's awesome that you guys did all this. Actually, I was thinking about adding a lot of notes about how I came up with the ideas and everything, but I didn't because I thought there'd be so many submissions for them to go through, all those notes would be annoying. I didn't want my entry to be a bore to read. But it's too late now, I already submitted my entry. What's done is done.
Either way, how are we gonna do all this sharing? I guess here on the general discussion board? It'd probably be way more organized to have everyone make separate topics so we could share individual feedback. But my main thought was when does everyone want to start posting? The contest ends tonight, right? I'd be cool with posting mine after midnight/tomorrow since the entry period will be done, but if everyone else was gonna wait until after the results, I don't wanna jump the gun.
Technically, the contest ends tomorrow night. Any e-mail date stamped as sent on or before the 28th is a valid entry.
It's going to take me a couple weeks to sort through them all. I want to read and consider and really work through each and every one in depth, and there are just under a hundred of them. And more coming in as I type this.
Holy…
…
Best wishes, Christopher - that's going to take a while.
Just under one hundred? That's scary. No wonder the next expansion is gonna be much later. Wow. Best of luck. I hope you guys can find a decent division of labor on that one.
In which case, I vote we start posting our entries after tomorrow night. That way we don't have to wait weeks to see all of them.
Now I feel like I should have shorten my entry so it's not such a hassle to read and consider. Almost one hundred... Wow.
If there's that many, and at least half of them get posted as topics here on the forums, we're gonna blow up with new topics. Maybe general discussion isn't the best place for this storm. Maybe we should post in Rules & Gameplay?
Now I'm both excited and scared. I hope I can manage to find entries from specific people I think will have awesome ideas.
I recommend that each person make their own "MyName's Villain Content Entry" topic in General, and then post their one or two submissions in there. That way the comments will stay close to the submissions themselves. If everyone posts 100 villains in a single giant topic, it will soon become impossible to tell who's commenting about what. And we probably don't need a unique topic per submission.
Yeah, it makes me wish that there was a homebrew or creativity sub forum... while I'm not the sort who produces any fan art or fanfic... I love creating alternate cards, new characters and such.
Yeah, when thinking what we'd do I realized what an even bigger mess it would be to have all the entries on one topic, so I figured we'd each make our own topic and people could visit those as they'd like. I didn't mean for it all to be under one topic. That would be a disaster.
Am I wrong in thinking that once upon a time >G asked that fan cards and ideas not be submitted/displayed on these forums? I've seen plenty sumbitted on BGG for instance but not here and I thought that was per their request. If so thats awesome and I thnk there ought to be a subforum for Fan-Creations, but if not we better be sure before everyone posts things after the contest. Have they chimed in on this discussion lately?
Actually, no, I don't think they've said anything about whether we can now or not. But didn't the legal part of the contest say that as soon as we submitted the entries, they became properties of >G? So that would mean we'd just be posting what we've already given them, so it should be okay. But that's just what I think. The real answer might be different. I guess some of us could go to BGG if necessary.
That's the interpretation I'm going with, that as soon as we emailed them our ideas for the contest, they became their property. They only warn us against posting unsolicited ideas, which are problematic legally.
Spiff is essentially correct. The concern was one voiced by our lawyers about people posting things and then disputing the ownership of ideas if some future character or deck of ours seems similar to a posted idea. However, as stated in the rules, all of the villain ideas submitted to the villain contest legally belong to Greater Than Games, LLC, so posting them won't have that difficulty. If people are very interested in posting their ideas, I can actually create an entire subforum for discussing that so that those posts don't clutter up the other fora and also are easy to find.
Paul is now the second person I have ever heard to actually use the word "fora."
I vote yes on the subforum. If we tried making these topics under general discussion, everything else would be buried underneath the sudden wave.
Oh, hey. It's already there. Awesome.
I suggest not posting ideas until September 29th, that way there isn't any confusion about whether ideas were submitted before seeing others ideas, stolen from others and reworked, etc...I see Paul created the subforum, maybe it'd be best if he locked it until then? With 100 entries, there are bound to be similarities, and that avoids any weird situations about the contest.
I went for the backstory, deck, art descriptions, etc. route. I was also lucky in that I had some friends who were willing to test them out. the wording isn't great on some of them, but I'm hoping that the intent was clear. I think I'm better with heroes than villains, but I gave it my best and had a lot of fun test games, so its all good!
Go ahead and do that, IMO.
If people post them in general, there will be somewhere between 50 and 100 posts, which will flood 4 or 5 pages of the board.
If they're all in one place, other topics wont get lost.
Also, if they're all collated together, it's easier for Christopher to avoid fan discussion while he judges the entries.
Gonna mail villain submission #2 today. Preview? He is a pacifist.
So…kill us with kindness?
Alright, so I see me and two others have posted ours on the sub forum. Let's have them, guys and gals!