It's time to get serious about NCFC.

This is our first year with having a date prepared so far in advance- unfortunately, it's not going to work out as planned and there will be a delay. Worry not though, the delay won't be too long and the new dates will be November 25th - November 29th in the Year of Luigi 2013.

What do you guys think about having the dates announced at the end of the event? Provided there are no complications, should we do it again? I'm thinking it's a good thing to have but maybe people disagree- send your feedback our way!

The countdown is ticking, and although we have the old theme up for now, a new one will rise to the occasion.

A few announcements to get out of the way.

The big one- registrations are now open. There's a few changes to how we're doing this year, and the big one is that we're accepting indie games now.

Here's the submission guidelines for that:

1. Fangame Booths must be related to Nintendo in some way. Either it can be based off of one of Nintendo's first party intellectual properties, or a game series that has appeared exclusively on a Nintendo console at one point. Examples would be something like a Mario or Castlevania fangame, and something we wouldn't accept would be something like a Call of Duty fan game. Since we're accepting indie games now, this is a bit more of a loose guideline, but we still want to keep the Nintendo focus.
   
2. For indie game booths, we have to take into consideration the fact that indie games can be for-profit (unlike fangames). We are O.K. with you selling your game- but keeping in the spirit of how we've had thins for a while, make sure there's some kind of free (as in cost) playable content for us to play your game.
   
3. Booths and games must not contain adult content (nudity, sexual themes, etc.)
   
4. Booths must not contain illegal content such as commercial ROMs or commercial PC games without the distributor's permission. Game mods and rom patches are OK.
   
5. Booths and games should be optimized as much as they can. If you are using huge WAV files for music, or resized a whole bunch of pictures to include, you need to change that.
   
6. File formats for game downloads should be ZIP, RAR, or 7Z. These are compressed folders, if you need a program to compress your game or decompress these files, try 7-zip.
   
7. File should be virus-checked and not contain any adware/malware.
   

Another thing we are looking for with indie games- bridging the gap between fangames and indie games. If you're making indie games but you used to make fangames, I think a booth that features your old fangames in addition to your current indie game project you want to present would be really cool to see!

For Workshops:
The types of topics we're looking for are of course game development related topics. Some examples would be how to use game making tools, programming languages, level design, graphics creation, music and sound composition, and other topics along those lines.
In terms of workshops, we're looking for ideal individuals with extensive knowledge of their topic, to share and teach others these concepts. Whatever medium is necessary, as long as it is accessible by attendees, and you are comfortable using it.

If you're interested in hosting a contests, competition (video game playing or otherwise), or anything along those lines, let us know. If you're interested in helping run those kinds of things, let us know too. And if you have any ideas of things we should host- let us hear your ideas too. You can either post in this thread or send a PM or email to the staff.

We are not doing awards this year. I don't think awards has worked out the way we wanted to in the past and the best way to go here is to try an event without them and see how that works out. Booth reviews will still be accepted, and if people are interested in submitting their own list of favorite booths we can look into ways to feature those as well.

For sponsors- if you have a reasonably sized site and are interested in working with us, please get in contact with us. We'll be hunting down the usual suspects as well.

We are also looking for a graphic designer. Someone to help us with themes and wahtnot. If anyone's interested in this, get in contact with us asap. (regardless if anyone responds to this, we will have a new theme up for this year though- don't worry about that)

This is a pretty big post and hopefully it'll cover everything that needs to be said for now. Let us know if there's anything else that needs to be clarified or updated.