300 entries at 8 hours a day would take almost 40 days. I assume there is some sort of screening process.
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I'm not sure how many of the 311 that have joined(it may be more now, but that's the last number I noticed) will actually manage to submit. I know that there have been several who have declared that they were not able to complete their submission for one reason or another. Then you will have the inevitable list of people who don't fit the qualifications for one reason or another. Many of the games won't be a full hour of gameplay. I wouldn't be surprised if there are more 30 minute games than full hour ones.
Either way, this will take some doing. I'm guessing that the fan favorite candidates will end up getting narrowed quickly as people will choose which games to spend time trying out based on descriptions and screenshots. It would be interesting to hear how long the judging period would be, however, as if there are even half of that number of hours worth of submissions, it will still take over a month probably (I'm guessing that unpaid judges aren't going to work 8 hour shifts for a month to judge this contest.)
I'd expect that most games would try to err more towards 40 minutes due to the 20 minute minimum and the rules require a minimum of 20 minutes. (my game can be speedrunned in about 5 minutes if you skip all dialogue and content, but is currently set up to require about 40-90 minutes of proper gameplay to finish. The problem is that speedruns can drastically shorten a game's length, which is especially bad in story focused games and lore focused games like mine.
What I've learned from the past is that fan favorites will be heavily determined by existing fanbases. The bigger your existing fanbases, the more call to action you can pull.
Allow me to address this: "The problem is that speedruns can drastically shorten a game's length, which is especially bad in story focused games and lore focused games like mine."
While I cannot speak for the Fan Favorite award, for the Top Three places, the judges will each judge based on their own criteria. Therefore, if your game is heavy-story, some judges will focus more on that, while others may focus more on gameplay, and others may focus more on aesthetic. Getting the four judges that we did (each who are experts in different aspects of Game Development) was on purpose. That way, each game gets different viewpoints before it moves up or down in the ranks, instead of just relying on one thing (like a story-focused judge playing a game with little story, etc.)
You know that human nature is to wait to the last second, right? inb4 500 new entries and 250 submissions in the last minute of the contest.
What if my game deletes itself and all saves if you choose to use the ultimate ultimate skill "World Crusher"? Would that count as a virus?
*Stares at the insanity skill which does random effects* or if one of my skills has a chance of deleting all of your save files?
Of course we know that, and we've prepared for a rather enormous set of entries. We can't really speak to what the judging schedule will be like until we know the exact number of submissions.
And if your game gets flagged by a virus scanner, like Norton or McAfee, then it's considered a virus. Not so much if you use clever coding. ;-)
That is actually kind of scary because you can pay to have programs added to certain virus scanners, iirc. (Although I somehow doubt anyone is going to pay thousands of dollars to shut out their competition when the prize is only a thousand dollars). (Not that I'm one to talk considering I spent over a thousand on assets for a contest with a max prize of a thousand).
I remember that for another contest, there were so many last minute entries that itch had issues and a bunch of entries didn't finish uploading in time and they ended up making a bunch of exceptions and extended the entry period.