Vista Adventure Writing Contest Winners

A follow up from this post.

Before we dive into the winners I (Cze) quickly want to apologise for how long it has taken to judge this contest and to thank all the entrants for their patience. Not only did we get many more entries than we anticipated but the contest closed just as life threw some curve balls at me.

Luckily 3 kind members of our community stepped in to judge instead. A big thanks to Jess, Seeds, and Essay for reading through all the entries in their spare time and shortlisting the best entries. I've now read their shortlist and we've decided together on the winners.

We had 182 entries in total, across Fantasy and Sci-Fi! There were a lot of fantastic ideas and I want to say a big thank you to everyone taking part. I definitely learnt some lessons on how not to organise a contest like this. If we disqualified every entry that broke one of the rules there'd be very few left to judge. So we've tried to be very lenient with the rules. I think we only disqualified one or two out of all the submissions.

It also seems that a lot of people struggled with the concept of a sandbox adventure, I think the parameters of that should have been explained better. We received many amazing linear/railroad adventures that weren't suitable for this contest but were well written or contained great ideas. So perhaps in future we'll run a contest for those instead!

Fantasy

Winner:
Break Out Of Hell by Zachary V.

Runners Up:
A Shipwreck Without The Water by Pebble T.
Coral Staircase by Marianna
Murder on Divinity Row by Erin D.

Honourable Mention:
Into the Greenswards by Emma B.

Sci-Fi

Winner:
Interdimensional Accidents on the Moon of Portemas by Ian F.

We decided to only go with 1 Winner for Sci-Fi. Unfortunately out of 182 entries, only 20 were for Sci-Fi.

All of the Winners and Runners Up will be made into Vistas over the next few months. When we're ready to move forwards with adventure writing we'll reach out to the Winners about expanding their entries.

For the Honourable Mention, we believed it was too big in scale and too linear to work well as a Vista but the amount of effort in the concept and presentation was outstanding and deserving of recognition.

Again, a big thank you to everyone for taking part. It seems this contest has spurred a mini community of writers on our Discord. If that sounds like something you want to join, please head over to the Czepeku community discord and see the #vista-writing channel. :)