I’m not trying to downplay your work at all or anything - in fact, I wasn’t even really commenting on the specifics of this situation with the noms for the award this year in particular, and I’m definitely NOT trying to say I “should” win or even be nominated
I have a lot of respect for people who go above and beyond for their setups from start to finish
I also have a lot of respect for people who can truly create things with competency
When you start to combine multimodal creation with going above and beyond for the setup is when you start to move into “yeah this is worth recognizing” territory and I would say you 100% fall into that camp
Just commenting as somebody who also does a lot of up-front work but basically stops there lel - Omega Strikers FM is a good example of this, where I spent a bunch of time before the game started prepping the artwork for the OP, perfecting the text color palate for each character’s card and the alignments and the OP and stuff, creating the end credits video, even literally ripping stuff from my game files to get the images used for in-game emotes which I resized to give the players fun pictures to use in-game. However, I never really used any of that to give the game itself any sort of meaning or anything - instead I just hunted around for a ton of memes and clips and just used those for all my VCs and start/end-of-phase posts. I think it’s hard to argue that the game itself had any flavor at all, really, beyond whatever the players gave it through their actions and the fact the game is based on a video game with a bunch of characters that other, non-me people created.
And personally, I’m happy with that. It’s what I want out of my games.
Contrast with either nominated game, where the characters are all custom, and there’s some effort made to tell a bit of a story through the flavor in a way that I just never really do, and I think it’s pretty clear which are in a class more deserving of the award for flavor.
So yeah, don’t knock yourself here please lel
