I remember proclaiming just before the end of the contest that I reckoned a top-ten place was well within my reach. As we all sit here waiting for some results at some point in the not-quite-certain-when future I have to admit that this outcome seems pretty unlikely! Of the games I've played, I reckon 'Ninja Loves Pirate', 'A violent world' & 'Operation Dog Tag' are pretty certain to defeat me. 'Toy Robo' ,'Pirate Tycoon' & 'Ink Wars' I put in the "I'm not sure" category because I couldn't see the game running properly or couldn't get the gameplay enough to figure out what was there, and "Timeblasters" also goes in this category because it's pretty polished but also quite simple, and I can't really tell how the judges will weight it. Then there are the games that I couldn't get to run which look great and have some good feedback - 'Zirconia 2: Battle', 'Apparatus Mortem', 'Paranoia', 'Shadows Of The Savage Fist', 'VIGDP3', 'Kasei', 'Warscale' & 'Star Robots'. So even assuming that other games don't look way better than their screenshots (I've not tried a few) that's 15 games. I reckon most of the "I'm not sure" games are a lot better than I could experience them on my old PC, and I'm sure that at least a few of the best entries require shaders and therefore I couldn't even test them. So it looks like I'm out of the prizes! I did also state I'd like to be in the top few of those who wrote their game just about from scratch without 3rd-party/existing engines; on this count I hopefully do a bit better but I'm not sure who used what. Anyone else wanting to take back their words, or on the other hand does anyone feel suprised in a good way at the standard of the competition?

All I can say is, next time I'll be putting more time and effort in.

It feels like I put maximum effort in - in the last month I got up before 6am to code before work, then coded until 11pm and put in 16hours a day at the weekends - but I also didn't decide to enter until a month in, and the next month I was working on making a new house livable.
I just wish I started when the contest was announced!

I wrote a long post, but then IE decided to delete it, so this is a short version of it:

What I think will be the top 10:
7 Area 511
9 Toy Robo
17 Zirconia 2: Battle
18 Timeblasters
23 Paranoia
28 Call of Booty
29 Ninja Loves Pirate
32 VIGDP3
33 Ink Wars
34 The Curse of Za Defami Island

(excluding A Violent World since I was involved in making it and would have placed it as #1 otherwise! ;)

Of these I think 29 will win, it has good gameplay, nice graphis and all 4 elements very nicley integrated in the game. However, 29 is not my personal favorite, I dislike the pixels/tiny screen to much for that..

/viblo

Looks like us two mostly agree then, although I didn't like Area 511. Mostly this was because everytime I clicked on something the window lost focus - a problem 3 or 4 entries shared on my multi-monitor system.

EDIT:
Although it seems we'll never know the top 10 (see the thread on announcing the results)

I don't want to feel foolish. I'm just wondering who outside of gamedev talks about these contests. Searching on google.
4E4 shows about 260,000
4E4 Contest shows 569
superpig shows up 56,300 :P

I put a crapload of effort into this, problem was, I started a month before the contest ended! Next time I will definately sign up early and I am pretty sure Ill have a good chance of placing in the TOP TEN if I put as much effort into it as I did this time, dont forget I was learning how to program C++ at the same time I was doing this! Yep next contest will be a breeeeze...