From Tybae, Vice-Chairman of the Academy for Modding Excellence

The Academy for Modding Excellence and The Only NWN Podcast have teamed up to announce the finalists for the 2008 NWN1 Golden Dragon Awards. For those of you who don’t know, the NWN Podcast has recently been streaming the host recordings of their shows. The AME has asked the Podcast if we could stream the finalists on their scheduled recording night and they have agreed. On Tuesday May 12 at 7:00pm PDT (UTC-8) Andarian and I will announce the finalists for the 2008 Golden Dragon Awards and Ashercon and Skunkeen will be the representatives from the Podcast team. To find out how to listen, please visit their forum page here. You will need some kind of media player that can stream from a URL. Winamp, Windows Media Player, iTunes, etc.

In addition to that, the NWN Podcast has an irc chatroom on irc.nwn2source.net. You can drop by the chatroom to ask questions, comment or just chat with whoever shows up on May 12th. Liso will be manning (womanning) the chatroom fielding questions and giving them to Andarian and I at the end of the announcements so we can answer as many as we can in the time allowed.

So save the date and drop by to find out who the finalists will be for The 2008 Golden Dragon Awards!

To discuss the NWN1 GDA Finalists Podcast, please feel free to visit our forums here.

I am sorry to announce that Ben Wynniatt-Husey, who has led the AME since October of 2007, has decided to step down from his position as AME Chairman. Ben’s adept guidance was instrumental in helping the AME to realize its founding dream of honoring the talented builders of the NWN community with a serious set of awards. His tireless leadership and innovative ideas were a tremendous asset to our team, and I believe that I speak for all of our membership when I say that I would like to sincerely thank him for everything that he has done to make the Academy for Modding Excellence a success. Thanks, Ben!

Ben will be retaining his AME membership, and still participating in some of our work in this year’s awards cycle. After a call for volunteers and a vote, I’m pleased to announce that the AME membership has elected me (Andarian) to serve as the AME’s new Chairman, and Tybae to serve as our new Vice-Chairman.

I’ve noticed that we’ve had a fair amount of traffic to the site recently, which I hope indicates that people are starting to check it to see if we’re ready to make any announcements yet. We haven’t had time to update the front page recently, so I just want to let everyone know that we’re still working hard on our awards! We’re just finishing the nominations phase for the NWN1 awards now, and should be in a position to start announcing the finalists fairly soon. Our NWN2 nominations phase is still ongoing, and the NWN2 finalists will be announced a little later in the year. We’re also still actively recruiting new members for the NWN2 awards, so if you’d be interested in volunteering to help us, feel free to drop me a PM on our forums. 🙂

Thanks for your attention, and good gaming!

Sincerely,

Andarian
Chairman, The Academy for Modding Excellence

Our look back at 2008 continues…

In October I took a break from looking at NWN works, and headed over to Edmonton, Canada, for a top secret look at Dragon Age. Together with a handful of other lucky NWN modders (including 3 Golden Dragon winners), we not only saw the game, but got a first exclusive hands-on with the toolset. I then returned to Greece and tried to keep my mouth shut for the next few weeks while I waited for Bioware to go public with the news!

December

In our final NWN1 Golden Dragon Award winner interview of the year, we tracked down savant, winner for Best Action Module with his final instalment of the Aielund Saga. His interview marked the final of 8 2007 NWN1 Golden Dragon winner interviews for the year.

The AME members then took some well deserved downtime, with a few of us heading over to the NWNPodcast for a roundtable, where we answered what we really get up to inside the private forums of AME!

I finished the year with something of a fall to earth though, following riots in Greece. But we all survived to make it to Christmas, and to gear up for…

The 2008 cycle!

The review of 2008 continues…

June

Big news! After 210 votes the 35 finalists were wittled down; the NWN2 Golden Dragon winners were announced! Highlights were a double win for Zach Holbrook and Adam Miller, whilst Alex Hugon completed his NWN 1/2 pair. Grinning Fool scooped the Community Contribution award, and Sorceress Ashura clinched the Custom Content award with a wonderful VFX pack.

July

We returned for our second public IRC chat, with community questions for the nominees of the NWN1 awards, including such weighty matters as how to model for ninjaweaselman’s animations. The chat generated a long free for all, including some attempts to get a winner modding group together…

Finally I manage to track down Fester Pot for our final 2006 Golden Dragon winner interview. He was late to the party, but forgiven, since he scooped two of the NWN1 2006 awards: Best Adventure and Debut Author. In 2008, his second module Shadewood also came out. The interview with Fester Pot was the 9th for the NWN1 Golden Dragon winners of 2006.

Even bigger news was the release of the NWN1 2007 Golden Dragon Winners!. After 258 votes, the 34 finalists had been culled to the final 11. The clutch of winners featured a second dragon for savant, a pair for the Citadel team, and second time lucky for Andarian and WoRm. On top axe_murderer took the coveted Community Contribution award, and Lance Botelle scooped the Debut Author award.

More to come…

In response to a question as to whether authors should be able to permanently withdraw their work from consideration, we recently polled the members. As a result of the poll, we have added the ability for authors to exclude themselves from consideration. The deadline for doing so is the end of February for the 2008 awards. Authors who wish to withdraw should message a current member and await confirmation, or post on the Golden Dragon Disucssion forums.

In probably the longest and closest debate that we have yet had in the Academy, we finally came to a conclusion on the Custom Content Awards for 2008.

For NWN1: the awards will stay as per previous years, namely, a Best Tileset Award, and a Best Custom Content Award.

For NWN2: All 3D content such as tilesets, placeables and creatures, are now encompassed in the new Best 3D Content Award. All other custom content remains in the Best Custom Content Award.

Happy New Year!

Every year we take a look at the awards that we are giving out to make sure they are up to date, and relevant to players and builders to help them find the very best. This year is no exception, and we already have some changes for this year’s cycle, and some more to come.

Best Adventure Module has been renamed Best Dramatic Module. It’s basically the same award, but the name better captures the intent of the award.

There will be no Best PnP conversion award this year.

As with last year, Best Sound/Music will be judged across both NWN1 and NWN2 together.

Further news to come: We are still debating what to do with the Best Tileset award for NWN2, the Best Multiplayer Module awards and the Best [insert language] Module Award. For both the Multiplayer award and the International module awards, it is a question of staffing, so if you are interested in making sure there is a Best Multiplayer award or a Best Fench or Spanish Module award (for example), please step forward to help out!

Well, apparently we have all had a break, but before you know it, it is that time of the year again: the Golden Dragon award cycle is beginning!

Once again, we make the normal call to all authors to ensure they have their work published on the Vault by the end of December if they wish to be considered. If you have work already on the Vault, but believe it is unfinished and should not be considered, you must notify AME by the end of January.

This year we welcome some new members to the AME team, and say farewell to some old ones who have moved on to other things. So it’s goodbye for now, and a big thank you to sixesthrice and Carlo One, who will definitely be missed for their incredible dedication and valuable inputs. On the other hand we welcome for this cycle ActorofVeil, Hellfire, liso, Dragonstar and Eat2surf (and maybe a couple more TBC). We look forward to working with you!

So if you can’t wait for the cycle to begin, why not catch up on the words of some of last year’s winners. Here are links to the last few interviews:

savant – Best Action (NWN1)
Robinson Workshop – Best Tileset (NWN2)
Andarian – Best Roleplaying Module (NWN1)
Marc Price – Veteran Author (NWN1)
Grinning Fool – Community Contribution (NWN2)
Zach Holbrook – Debut Author (NWN2)

…for those of you who celebrate it!

We’re looking forward to seeing you in the New Year as the new award cycle gets under way!