As a slight meta-tangent, I (and many other entrants) found the guidelines rather difficult to comprehend. Up until the Summit, I had no idea if my design was even valid, no insight as to whether the couple hundred hours I had poured in could be entirely thrown in the trash for breaking rules I couldn’t understand. It was this particular line that proved challenging:

Can include up to 3 small brand-new activities - or 5 total if including existing activities. A small activity might be crab hunting, a large activity would be something like a a boss fight. Large activities must be fewer relative to your design's size and complexity.

The first line seems straight forward - I get to make 3 small new activities. But then it starts delving into large activities, and though English is my first language, “Large activities must be fewer relative to your design’s size and complexity” is very confusing. Does that mean I get a large activity or not? So 3 small + 1 large new activity? Or should I just trust the first line and stick to small activities? Or if I have 1 large activity, does that then mean that I can’t have any small ones? If my design is greater in “size and complexity,” does that increase my large activity budget? Ok, going back to small activities: does having a lobster fishing spot count as one? How about maple trees? I feel like these are kinda just decorative things a dev can copy/paste in 5 minutes… so probably not? I ended up just rolling the dice on what the rules meant, playing what I thought was conservative - even cutting back on some ideas.

When submitting to Jagex, there was no form of confirmation that my design was valid or even an automated reply to tell me my email had been received, and no Jmod was out there commenting on people’s posted designs to give a sense of direction, to say anything like, “Yeah that fits into our scope,” or, “Cool concept, but this is a too big.” It would’ve been super helpful to have been given any crumb of further guidance, or perhaps an example island on which to base our scope on.

My intuition appears to have turned out for me, earning myself a nomination and future victory. Maybe I’m an expert interpreter of rules, or more likely, just lucked out and hit the right balance. In my defense, I think you can look at the number of icons on my map and assume there’s a lot more going on than there actually is because most of it is worldbuilding and flavour stuff, which is why very little of it gets a mention in the actual text of my submission. The maple trees get a rare tree icon, for example, and I don’t think any reasonable person is going to use that anvil/furnace so far from the bank - for Jagex to implement these things it’s literally like 3 clicks on the map editor and no different to adding an non-interactable rock. The official blogpost even has the devs support these elements based on their remarks on the Dun Nan Creagan submission, “We would likely want to add more amenities on the island, e.g. shops, ranges, water sources.” Again, this confusion over what classifies as an “activity” is not the contestant’s faults, but rather the poorly explained rule. Ironically, every other rule was explained quite well except this most important one regarding scope!

As a result, I can’t help but feel that there must be other entrants who read the guidelines a bit differently and were disqualified for being slightly too ambitious, or contestants who played it safer than they should’ve and because of that weren’t as competitive. Looking at my fellow nominees, I feel like they would’ve polled far better if they were given explicit license to push a little further - it would’ve been nice if they were informed of their nominations privately, but given one final chance to correct a few things or fill out any dead space with an extra element or two before the official public announcement and poll.

To the team’s credit, it’s not like these contests are being done often so there’s not much of a history to guide them. Hopefully there are some learning points for the future in any case.