Originally posted by amhunterI was looking at the contest and the authenticity as "Make it like a SMW fortress and see what Nintendo would do", so I took a look at what the other fortresses looked like and saw a lot of simple designs and some receptivity, so after applying some of that, and seeing the score low in authenticity (I know points got deducted for coins) I got, I was kind of shocked.
Did you read Deputy's judging comment? It pretty much highlights where your entry went wrong with authenticity. If it's not clear enough, I'll gladly explain in detail: SMW doesn't simply repeat challenges in a level without adding various twists to them. It introduces a standard and then it evolves or expands on that. Valley Fortress is a very good example of that design philosophy being put to action. Also, in all fortress levels the second room has significant differences in design from the first one, so it keeps getting the player interested. Heck, Chocolate Fortress even goes with a completely different theme for its second room (although that's an outlier among the other forts). You failed to provide an experience that follows these mindsets, and the fact repetition directly affects the gameplay made it all worse.
Anyway, in case you guys are interested, my metric for judging authenticity was: checking if the entry complies with SMW's design philosophies, if it fits the area your entry was meant to be for, and consistency with the other levels in the game.
So for example, no matter what location the castles and fortresses were in the original game, they'd always be indoors. So if your entry had an outdoors section, I penalized it.
Another example would be the castle BG with candles. If your entry lacked the candle flames for no good reason, I penalized it, since all the instances of that BG in the original game had the flames.