Onyx Academy Launch Challenge

The launch of Onyx Academy is no news already. We created a platform dedicated to providing high-quality education to individuals all around the world.

To celebrate this exciting launch, we are excited to introduce a new challenge, with thousands of dollars in prizes!

About the Launch Challenge

Quality education is important and everyone should have access to it, regardless of their background. That is why we are launching this challenge to encourage and reward learners who are committed to advancing their education and personal development.

Our challenge will be based on the creation of a prop or small diorama, and will aim to challenge artists to push their boundaries, try new techniques or styles, and create artwork that is original, innovative, and visually compelling. Participating artists can gain valuable experience, build their portfolio, and receive feedback from our community, which can help them to grow and improve their skills over time.

The challenge will have a duration of 1 month, and winners will be announced on a maximum of 10 days after its completion. We cannot wait to share this challenge with you and hope that it will inspire you to join us on our mission to provide accessible, high-quality education to all.

It is important to mention that everyone is welcome to join and participate, but prizes will be reserved to aspiring artists, as we think they are the ones who will benefit from them the most.

The Challenge Judges

To ensure that everyone has a fun and fair experience, we have established a set of rules that will be enforced by the judges throughout the competition. So what better place to start than introducing our judges!

For this challenge, we have a panel of highly experienced professionals of the games industry, who will follow a certain criteria to rate the participant's work.

Entries for this challenge will be judged based on their creativity, execution, and effectiveness to tell a story related to the theme of this challenge, which will be announced soon. The quality of modelling, texturing, lighting and overall presentation will also be considered based on the potential of each participating artist.

Judges will adjust their expectations to three levels of quality - beginner, intermediate and advanced, to ensure a fair chance of success for the all artists independently of their current skills.

Our fifth judge, the community, will vote on who they think should take first, second or third place for each category, so get ready to participate as a decision maker too! The result will be added and averaged with our judges verdicts.

Challenge Rules

Our judges will be responsible for enforcing and following the rules for this challenge when deciding on our winners. To ensure they have an easy time, and everyone is on the same page regarding what the can or cannot do, they have put together some simple guidelines and rules to guide you through the challenge:

Participation Eligibility: All participants should be members of the Onyx Academy Discord server, read the rules, and have the "Community" role assigned to them.

Artwork Eligibility: All entries for this challenge should be composed with original, new artwork created specifically for the challenge.

Work in Progress: All participating artists will be required to create their own entry within the dedicated forum channel in the server, which will become available once the challenge starts, and keep it up to date with work in progress images.

Theme: All entries should follow the theme set for this challenge, which will be announced on the starting date.

Creativity: Participants will be required to come up with their own ideas, so submissions should not contain fan art or content heavily inspired by a particular IP.

Categories: The challenge will hold two separate winning categories. Aspiring Artist and Professional Artist. Prizes are reserved for the Aspiring Artist category, as we believe they will benefit from this the most. Participants will be required to tag their own entries to ensure judges can rate their work accordingly.

Extra Points: All artists who stay active and provide feedback and assistance to other participants will have a better chance to increase their rating on the challenge.

Groups: Here at Onyx Academy we encourage team work as much as we can. However, to maintain the participation conditions even for everyone, only submissions from individuals will be eligible for rating.

Submissions: One submission per participant will be permitted at most, and only finalised work will be eligible for our judges to rate. Images should be in high definition, and easy to zoom in on, so at least 1920px on the longest edge of the image is desired.

Deadline & Winners: All work must be finalised and submitted before 11:59PM CEST on the 5th of June. Judges will announce winners for each category on June the 12th.

We're happy to hear your thoughts as community judges for these rules!

Our Prizes and Rewards

Our latest challenge comes with a total prize pool of $3000, which will be distributed to the top three contestants. The first-place winner will receive a grand prize of $1500, while the runner-up will take home $1000. The third-place winner will receive a cash prize of $500.

On top of this, we'll use our fast-growing reach to promote the works and portfolios of our winners! This will include our four winners on the Professionals category.

Our challenge is open to all individuals who have a passion for innovation and creativity. We are looking for the best and brightest ideas in the industry, and we believe that our prize money will help to encourage the personal development of the newcomers to the very demanding games industry.

We will be providing more information on this challenge in the following weeks, including details on how to participate and the amazing prizes that await our winners, so stay tuned, it's coming and we're dedicated to making it an amazing one.

In the meantime we wanted to share the schedule of when you can expect to hear more:

Soon, we will be announcing our prizes and rewards.

More coming soon!

Stay tuned for more, as we will be updating this post with all the new information coming, and in the meantime, join us in celebrating the launch of Onyx Academy in our Discord Server!