Well, the new Contributor site is now live, featuring the stylized new World of Depleted Contributor Logo (as pictured below):
The major element of the new Contributor site is that folks can easily sign up as Contributors without having to mess around with .PDFs or extra hassles on their end! (Plus for the fans, rather than a CAPTCHA code for verifying your humanity, you get to solve a very simple Gavin code. A nice touch that adds some fun to the process!) To simplify things, the Contributors section is governed by the Contributor agreement as part of the official registration for it. Non-Contributors can still read and watch the main content found in this page, as well as comment with their thoughts, but they can’t do some of the fun things Contributors can do (like the Challenge mode below) and they won’t have access to some of the building block assetts until they choose to become a Contributor.
One of the now realized elements (which we’d alluded to earlier) of the Contributor section is the Challenge section. After having been able to check it out a bit, it’s very cool! Clearly an encouragement for folks to sign up as Contributors immediately, the Challenge feature is updated regularly with short challenges in one of five categories: Writing, Films, Audio (including music), Photography/Art, and Games. You have to be a Contributor to be able to submit stuff, but, if you are, it’s super easy. Once you decide to apply for a challenge, you fill in a bit of information about yourself and submit your short story, or photo, or whatever else. (Small attachments for stories and photos can be included with the submission, whereas you’ll need to link to larger attachments you have hosted elsewhere to cut down on clutter during the review process.) Not sure what all the winner perks will be, although they are all eligible to be canonized and some seem to be designed to fit directly into pre-envisioned collections. (For the latter, this means that there’s a specific work you’re contributing toward, which is often times easier than just submitting whatever comes to mind.) I have heard from Jeremy Hanke that they’re setting this feature up to be a specialized feed that fans can subscribe to, so they will be notified whenever new challenges are available.
It also looks like, at this point, the short film Forsaken will be launching on March 2nd in its official capacity as External Canonized content!
Finally, a few new groups have started covering the new elements Depleted is embracing, including YURDigital (who will also be helping provide specific products that are useful to Contributors) and Megaton.Us, a group that is very much abour post-apocalyptic tales!
To read Lillian Hawkins (of YUR Digital) interview with Founder Jeremy Hanke, go to: World of Depleted Explored: Interview with Jeremy Hanke
To read the coverage of the new features of Depleted in Megaton’s page, go to the article: Help Shape The World of Depleted
Additional news will be coming as we know it! I don’t know about you, but I’m already very excited!
Most awesome – with the challenges – will they be ongoing or only run for a specific amount of time?
DocWho,
We’re still deciding on that. My current thought is that it’ll be a mixture. Some will have an extremely limited window (those that have more physical prizes and perks), while, others, will be up until we feel like we’ve gotten so many good representations of the particular concept that we retire it. (Obviously, fans will always be able to create content based on anything that fascinatest them, but we would probably not do challenges for things that are already heavily represented, since we really want there to be a lot of variety available to our fans!)
-Jeremy