Good evening! We come to you with two important, though slightly unrelated, updates.

Firstly, the Quality Control process for this year’s contest has concluded, and we have moved on to formally conducting evaluations! Of the 94 submissions that were complete and NOT just obvious spam (like someone else’s Mortal-fucking-Kombat ROM Hack, for some reason…), 58 total entries made it through to this year’s contest. I will acknowledge that this is a bit less than previous years, but that is to be expected given the elevated Quality Control standards we implemented this year. If you submitted an entry, can still access your entry page, and did not receive a formal rejection notice via email, then congrats; you made the cut!

Secondly, I want to cover a question that we, honestly, should have done a better job publishing the answer to in an official capacity: where is this year’s Sonic Hacking Spotlight? Straight to the point, we decided to skip it for this year to focus on improving the contest and to buy us some time to figure out what exactly we want to do with it going forward, because a number of us in the staff team believe it is in need of a rework. Allow me to explain.

While imitating the modern Nintendo Direct-esque format of a headline reel has its perks in terms of rapid delivery of information and exposure to a lot of community projects in short order, the result, when built to spec with little deviation, is a little… soulless and generic. Don’t get me wrong, I think we did a decent job on the previous spotlights with gags and did just enough to make it feel earnest and genuine in a way that other imitations struggle with, but the fact remains that the format is fundamentally more of an extended advertisement than it is an authentic spotlight of projects, resources, and the people behind them. I believe we need to make additions (i.e. interviews, deep dives, and a little more personality) that give viewers more to sink their teeth into and consider.

In fact, I wanted to do that this year, but life wasn’t really kind to the schedules of anyone who could have worked on refining this and chipping in additional help to get it off the ground, especially with the massive overhaul this year’s contest saw. So, I kept kicking the can down the road, and here we are. I should’ve made this part of the announcement months ago, and I apologize for the delay.

I’ll make sure to keep you all in the loop as we navigate how to improve the format of the Sonic Hacking Spotlight, and I am certainly open to hearing suggestions for additions or improvements if you’ve got ‘em. With that, I think that’s everything for this update. If all goes smoothly, the next update should be for this year’s teaser trailer, and opening submissions not too long after that!

Stay tuned.