Alright, so what I've gathered thus far to improve everything would be:
We will go through all the games that are currently added and look through which users have been active in the past 3 months, as well as make sure their status on our website is still a member and not banned.
As well as give them 3 months to go through the nominees prior to voting. Then give one more month for the actual voting process. This will put us at around April for the final results to see who's won.
One game per person. Meaning, if they've came up with 4 games in the past year, and qualify to have their game featured they will have to pick the game they seem the most fit.
Potentially, the people who don't put out games (focus on answering questions/making resources/what have you) might feel left out, but that’s neither here nor there. It's just incentive to put something out there, imo.
This will be addressed here shortly as I have some ideas behind this :)
How about nominating games/projects first? By that you have a smaller range of candidates and for that it is possible for people who don't know the nominees yet to play them all / read the whole project thread. It is much easier to last minute test and try 5 games than 25.
I would open a thread and everybody can nominee up to 3 games with a little explaination, why they nominate it (otherwise people just might throw in everything and in the end you have all the games nominated...).
Then a thread with a small banner for every game (maybe provided by the crator of the game) and a little description and the voting.
My biggest fear about nomination would be the potential of lack of responses. If only one person nominates 3 games then that would essentially be all that is available for the contest. If we have the staff go through the games, and see who all meets the requirements, and messaging them asking them what game they want for the contest (Assuming they have more than one game) it would cut down on the chances of not having people nominate games. However, I feel this would be great once the community get's bigger, and more active :)
As for the last year winner going up against the games in the next year, this contest is simply to showcase the best games of the year. Meaning, only games in the current year (2016) would be eligible. Same for 2017, only those games made in 2017 would be able to participate in next years event.
Of course this will be the first of the events so there will be some setback, and the requirement for additional tweaks/changes for the future events so I'm going to go ahead and go with what I have laid out right now and see how this goes as a guinea pig.