At 1 AM today (2 hours after starting)
Me: "Oh, f.ck me, I forgot!"
But it was hopeless. I couldn't set up any projects/whatever beforehand, and I know myself, setting up a project and the basic stuff and actually starting to code the main stuff takes me 2 hours.
I guess stress/unemployment/middle-life-crisis/11PM is not a good combination for contests like this.

Sorry.

Will all the contestants' games will be listed here, or I should try to gather them somehow?

I moved the game to a new address http://nicollet.net/harbringer.

Also, I've posted a postmortem on my blog.

I will find a space to put the games up some time today. I intended to do this before hand, but then again, I also didnt intend to work 60 hours last week or have a killer migraine last night.

Monkey In Black, your submission is fine.

I've create a project on CodePlex for the contest. You can get the games for the latest contest in the Downloads section. I think this will make the entire contest a lot easier to manage.

If you're interested in getting involved with the contest on a regular basis, let me know and I'll add you as a contributor to the project. You won't have to help out with all of the contests, but it will give you access to edit things when necessary.

Okay, here are my reviews, in alphabetical order of contestant.

eedok - another impressive effort. It took me a while to realize what I was doing or how I was even progressing. Programmer art FTW. With a little tweaking and maybe a few more features, this could be a challenging game.

Endurion - I was actually really impressed with this game, after a play or two to figure out what was going on with the plant growth. It's an interesting sort of adaptation of the old "Pipe Mania" game. This is one of the more complete and puzzle-like games out of the bunch. It provided a good challenge that was still beatable with some thought. Well done.

Monkey in Black - The game works, and I appreciate the use of the sprite library for rapid development. Overall though, the game is a little slow and there doesn't seem to be much of a danger from the wasps.

Toorhvyk - I like that the game is programmed in &#106avascript, and I appreciate the use of the sprite library for rapid development. The mechanics work smoothly, and there is a definite puzzle game strategy to the play, but there doesn't seem to be a consistent challenge. I actually thought that Checkmate was the hardest board in the game. Nice Konigsberg reference. Maybe if there were a consequence to retreading the grass it would make the game more difficult. Or maybe it doesn't need to be, it seems your later levels avoided that problem entirely by surrounding dirt tiles with bridge tiles.

Trapper Zoid - he admits himself that the game is incomplete and doesn't have a goal yet. Still, I applaud him for posting his results, that actually takes a lot of bravery.


AndyEsser gave me his reviews:
Eedok - This was an interesting concept that got a bit too repetitive too quickly. Was too easy to relax into a trance and go into autopilot to finish each level.

Endurion - Good idea, similar to the old 'Pipe Mania' game of old. Would be good to see some variation in plant type and some obstacles to have to avoid

MonkeyInBlack - A bit boring a repetitive. There was never any real sense of danger from the wasps. Maybe random flight paths wouldve made it more challenging.

Toorvyk - This was an interesting challenge. The use of the sprite library gave it a much more polished look & feel. A few more levels wouldve been nice and none were too challenging. Very enjoyable to play nonetheless.

Trapper Zoid - As an incomplete game it didn't rank too highly but definitely deserves merit and wouldve made for a nice game which wouldve been a good challenge.



After analyzing the judges votes, I've found that Endurion's Growth is the winner. He ranked consistently high in the judges voting, being picked for first by 2 and second by 1.

Next, in second place, is Toorhvyk's Harbinger of Spring, receiving 2 second place votes and one 3rd place vote.

And in third place is eedok's Spring Spring, having the next highest standing.

Good job everyone. You should all be really encouraged with your results. Most people never let their games see the light of day, and in three hours all of you made something that someone could at least look at and fiddle around with. I think that's really the key for indie game development, stick to one or two ideas and refine them so that you can get them out to other people. And I promise, this time, we won't wait 3 years for the next contest.

Wow, thanks a lot :) And also congrats all other entrants. 3h is not much but there are lots of nifty ideas to be found!

Some short post mortem:

What went right:
-Prepared a base framework to work off in advance: The framework does nothing more than open a window, initialise Direct3d/Sound, loads textures/sounds, displays them and also provides text output. This way I can plunge right into the gameplay coding.
-Taking time to think about the theme: I didn't immediately start coding, but took ten minutes, googled a dictionary with "spring" and pondered a few different ideas.

What went wrong:
-I did plan a few more ideas, collecting stuff and especially branching. I wanted the player to control the leftmost branch until it hits a dead end. Only after that the next available branch would grow. This way the player could concentrate and would not have to switch back and forth. I however messed up the automatic branch selection and had to disable it. This feature would've given opportunity for a few more puzzly puzzles as in reaching several windows.

I just bought my GDNet+ membership with the prize money. Many thanks! I'll be in first place next time, I swear :) *shakes fist*