Today we have an interview with Eric “Berra” Karlsson, whose module Surviving Horror 2 won the Golden Dragon Most Replayable Module Award for 2006. We learn a bit more about his ‘horrific’ tastes, as well as what he’s up to now…

Read and discuss it here.

Aristan, Golden Dragon winner for Best Roleplaying Module category for 2006, gives some insights into what’s happening with the sequel, thoughts on the Golden Dragons and other work in progress…

You can read the full interview and comment here…

In one of our longest and most heated debates, we finally resolved what to do with work that has been sitting in beta for a long time. Some time ago we published an announcement that all work in the 2007 cycle needs to be out of beta by the 31st of January 2008 in order to be considered for the 2007 awards.

All well and good, but what do we do with work that was left in beta? Originally it was our intention to roll this over to the following year, but this presented us with two problems; i) how to track it down and ii) we actually wanted to discourage ‘endless betas’. Nevertheless, we still want to award the best, so we wanted to allow room to ensure we could, without setting unreasonable restrictions that cut into testing time once a submission went public.

So the final solution we decided upon was: all submissions released in year 1 that are still in beta when the year 1 award cycle starts, will be viable for year 2 but no longer. In year 2, they will be considered as final even if they are unfinished.

Whilst it is unlikely that a submission in this state would get nominated, it is possible, so we wanted to make it clear how it would be handled.

Tonight we have an interview with Savant, who won the 2006 Veteran Author Golden Dragon Award for NWN. His Aielund Saga has been highly recommended by many, and we find out what he’s going to do now he’s finished it…

Read it here and discuss…

This is to announce that there will likely be only a single merged award for NWN and NWN2 for the Best Sound/Music award. This is because there is no simple way to distinguish which game the majority of sound and music files uploaded to the Vault belong to. In the event that the finalists can clearly be differentiated by game (such as module nominees), we may reconsider and award one for each game.

Discuss.

We have our second in the series of Golden Dragon winner interviews tonight, with Hugie, winner of the NWN 2006 award for Best Action Module. Hugie likes to divide his time between building for himself and Ossian Studios, and chasing down those elusive awards…

Read and discuss the interview here.

Today we are publishing the first in a series of interviews from Golden Dragon Award winners. lord_rosenkrantz won the 2006 NWN award for Best Hak – Tileset, with his Immersive Swamps contribution. Find out how lord_rosenkrantz got into the tileset scene, his influences and his view on receiving a Golden Dragon!

Read the interview and discuss it here.

Just a quick heads-up for some of the things we have coming at AME over the next few days. First of all, we hope to soon have posted our first Golden Dragon Award Winner interview. It is our aim (no pun intended) to have an interview with each of 2006’s winners, assuming we can track them all down!

We’ll also be posting some rule clarifications on what happens when judging works that have been submitted to the Vault, yet remained in beta for a long time.

Lastly, there’ll be some news on the Community Contribution and Sound Award categories, so track back here!

Noticed that little Blogroll list on the right that is currently empty and inactive? Well, we’re thinking of opening it up, not just for AME member blogs, but also for community bloggers. If you’d like to get a link to your blog posted in the roll, you need to:

• Spend at least half of your blogging time talking about relevant NWN or NWN2 stuff – be it building your own module, latest news or whatever. We want to make sure the blogs listed here are relevant.
• Be a registered member of our forums, plus include a link to AME on your blog site. This is to ensure you are a bone fide community member.
• Write a non-defamatory, non-racist, non-sexist, etc (you get the rest) blog. We will be reading them from time to time, and we ask everyone to notify us of unsuitable blogs that are linked to from the AME site.

We’re also considering link swaps with relevant sites. For those that are interested in either option, please PM BenWH on the forums.

The Academy for Modding Excellence will be handling the author recognition awards for NWN2 slightly differently this year, as it is the first year. Normally, we have a veteran award for those who have also produced work in previous years, and a debut award available for all other authors. In order to ensure everyone is eligible for an award, but to help level the playing field, we have split these two awards for NWN2 as follows:

The Veteran Author Award will be given to authors who have produced a work in NWN2 in the current cycle, but have also produced work in NWN1 in previous years. (Submissions for Bioware’s original Writer’s competition do not count, due to the highly restrictive rules of that competition, but all other modules do)

The Debut Author Award will be given to authors who have produced their first work for NWN2 in this cycle, and did not author anything for NWN1.

This will be an exception only for this year.

To find out why we decided to do this, head over to the forums.