The compilation album has been published. The prizes have been distributed. I have just posted the reviews I assigned myself to write. And with this post, I am basically ready to conclude AIM for this year. 

(promo art credit: catnippackets)

If you haven’t seen the results yet, you can find them here: https://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1559482/

If you didn’t receive a review on your track and want one:

1. Check the “Review Tracking” section of the judging spreadsheet to see which judge assigned themself to review your track. 
2. If a judge is assigned, you may reach out to them (within reason) to check the status of your review.
3. If no one is assigned to review your track, you can let me know, and I can leave you a review based on the notes I took when rating your track (similar to the reviews I posted for this AIM already).

AIM 2026 was a smaller compo, but I felt things went pretty smoothly operations-wise. The biggest surprise was the judging panel. In a lot of years, it’s pretty difficult to find three other users who want to judge, but this year, there were so many people who volunteered that I ended up turning some of them down. I did add space for another judge in my spreadsheet, so we ended up with 5 judges in total as opposed to 4 like usual. Maybe if I figure out a better way to accommodate more users on the spreadsheet, I could take more judges. I would probably need to start calculating averages for the judging scores rather than total points. 

Changes

New Judging Category: Sound Design

This was the first year of adding a new scoring category for judging: Sound Design. The goal was to get 5 different categories to slightly reduce the weighting of the “Art Relevance” score (from being 25% of the total score to 20%), as there were some concerns that the judging placed a little too much emphasis on the music in relation to its art inspiration. Personally, I didn’t have too much of an issue including it in my scores, though I did find myself sort of overlapping it with Production sometimes. I think things get difficult when very technical categories can cross over with each other sometimes. 

What did you think of the new category? Could we do without it or should we continue using it going forward? 

Prizes

Soundpaint gift cards were the main prize again, and I feel these have been working well as something that is pretty easy to obtain and distribute to the winners in a reasonable amount of time. This year, I was able to receive extra funds to give away gift cards to all the runner-ups and the Fan Favourite. I tried to start a prize pool this year, but it ultimately didn’t receive anything. I think it was because I put it too low in my post, and I chickened out trying to promote it. Next year, I will bump the prize pool request up a few notches, maybe even put it in my initial announcement post before the start of AIM. It would be nice to pool some funds to have a heftier set of prizes. 

As far as Soundpaint goes, it seems like this still is a fine choice for prizes, from what I gathered on the NG Audio Pub Discord. iZotope was brought up as a suggestion for a future prize. I’m not familiar with this; it seems like a subscription-based service. But if it’s helpful at all or has any interest, I could look into it further. 

Past AIMs used to have physical prizes like custom USB drives and CDs. These are super cool, but they were a huge pain to organize. However, I learned a lot this year about how to get the messages and gift card codes sent out quickly and efficiently, and I think a lot of that would help if this contest were to have physical prizes again. Still, I’m not sure if it’s worth revisiting at this time.

Bandcamp

I went into the AIM Bandcamp account, and I noticed that the Paypal address was set to an email I didn’t recognize (probably from the former organizer, but I’m not 100% sure). I changed it to my Paypal address for now, as at least one of the older albums is being set to receive payments. This could be changed to make it not be name-your-price, though it would get rid of the one review left on that album. 

I used my Paypal to purchase all the Soundpaint gift cards this year, and I think that would be something I’d like to use going forward. The Bandcamp albums could be another way to pool funds, though I would definitely want to make that clear (if I were to do it) that this wouldn’t be for profit, but to have the funding for prizes for future compos. 

To be clear, I am going to stick with making the albums free-to-download (the whole album, not individual tracks) - this is saying if I were to make it paid, it would be for the purpose of funding prizes for future AIMs. 

Review Format

I tried to refine my review format this year to be related to the judging categories rather than having some paragraphs that may not address all the categories. With this came a change in how I was evaluating the tracks:

1. I listen to the entry with the art as reference twice and take notes on the entry - what stood out, what really bothered me, anything of note, etc. 
2. At least a day later, I will listen to the entry at least once again and will sort my notes into the five judging categories (Composition, Production, Sound Design, Emotion, Art Relevance). I would then focus on the categories that didn’t have as much information to try and add something or expand upon them at least a little bit. 
3. I then use those notes to format into the review.

On average, the initial listening session and follow-up take about 15-20 minutes in total, and the review writing can take anywhere from 10-30 minutes, depending on how much I have to say about the track or want to get into detail. I find I overthink a lot of what I want to say, so having an opportunity to kind of just write whatever notes I want and then sift through and revise my thoughts in a later session does help for the most part.

Featured Tracks

Honourable Mentions

Here are a couple of tracks that really stood out to me from this compo that didn’t win:

peace in loneliness by @Katertash23

I am a big fan of the way this track used patterns and playing around with the metre to create this feeling of wandering and finding peace. The piano counterpoint, the rising lower strings, the little bells - this texture really stuck with me even after the compo was over.

moss by @realsugarlord

In my opinion, the art inspiration can really be felt through this track’s sound design, especially when that beat kicks in. It is a bit slow to start and the outro seems a little random, but the main loop fits in perfectly as background music to this game concept art. Especially 2:43 when that lead plays - gah that’s so good!

He Who Saw the Deep by @BusanBlack

Now this one’s just lovely to listen to. I love the sound of the guitars. Lots of great layers and very chill, complementing that night landscape in the art.

Fluorescein by @IndexatioN

Gosh those bells take me back to playing OneShot through and through. I love how this track really takes its time to build that loop. It remains pretty even when it’s intense. 

Out-of-Contest Entries

This year, there were a few tracks made outside of the contest - either from judges or out of the range of the allotted time to work on and submit a track. I wanted to note a few that I was aware of:

Toads singing downstream by @carboluka

cautiously serene by @3manon

Memento by @CrowdDoll featuring @Uxvellda

https://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/project/7834661

Future Plans

There are a couple of things I’ve been thinking about for future AIMs:

General AIM Promo Art

There’s a lot of wonderful artists who have created promo art for each AIM. However, I am thinking about having an icon/banner for AIM in general. This would be for the Bandcamp page and potentially for a wiki (see next section). I would probably also use it for announcing the next AIM and for my general AIM favourites playlist. Don’t get me wrong; I love all these designs, but using an icon designated for a specific year of AIM can be confusing sometimes. 

The main obstacle for me right now is what sort of design I’d want this general AIM banner/icon to be. I think once I have some ideas, I’ll put out another post to see if an artist would be interested (or if they have their own ideas, maybe…). 

AIM Wiki?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, as someone who has been editing wikis since 2010. It’s pretty difficult to find a lot of resources for previous AIM contests. Sure there’s a search feature for the forums, but even then, it’s tedious to use - not to mention the multiple threads for submissions, discussion, Fan Favourite voting and results. 

It would be nice to set up a dedicated wiki for this contest where all these links and resources were in one place. This could also be an opportunity to, say, create pages for specific composers and show all the past AIMs they participated in or a page for an artist and show the pieces of art that were used as inspiration for specific AIMs. There could even be pages for artwork showing the entries that used that art as inspiration (yes, there are several entries that have used the same art as inspiration). I think it would be a nice way to show and preserve the history of the contest and its output. 

This would definitely take a lot of time to set up, though I have done some planning in terms of how the data could be set up to make this work. I would also need to show that there would be interest in a wiki like this that people would want to use or potentially contribute to. If worse comes to worst, I could just make a news post with a bunch of links to past AIMs. Honestly that would probably be easier (but not as fun). This would be the other usage for that general AIM art I was talking about earlier - getting a banner for an “AIM Wiki” logo that could be used in a broader sense. 

Conclusion

For now, I would say I’m mostly ready to take a break from AIM until next year. I still have my financial course to study for (the exam is at the end of October :O), and I want to get back into editing wikis for the other wikis I’m a regular editor on. One of my other goals was to work on releasing another EP, but I’m thinking this might be a goal I defer to next year. 

Thank you to the composers who participated this year who always make the job of judging difficult and competitive (I hope in a friendly way). I hope to see all of you, plus any interested lurkers out there, in next year’s compo!