And the winner is...
When we first announced the competition and its "GROW" theme in January, the response was warm and welcoming. There seemed to be a popular expectation that the competition would yield games similar to the Grow series from On of Eyezmaze. Instead, we received more than a dozen different "GROW" interpretations, each one creative and original in its own way, and not a single Grow clone. And still the games exceeded our expectations.
As with our first competition last August, we have once again been entertained and delighted by the creative brilliance of a group of highly talented Flash game designers. The task of choosing just 2 of them to receive the honor of a prize was difficult at best. Many of the games were very close as the five reviewers—John, Drew, zxo, Harukio, and myself—recorded scores according to a set of rubrics established for the theme of this competition.
One game, however, scored well above all other entries, thus making the winner of this competition a unanimous choice...
- First Place: Sprout by Jeff Nusz
- Runner-up: Gateway II by Anders Gustafsson
- Honorable mention: Rings and Sticks by Florian Himsl (Komix)
Congratulations to the winners and to everyone who submitted an entry! Your participation in these competitions makes future competitions like this possible. It is our sincere hope that, even if you do not win a prize, you do receive a kind word and constructive feedback on your work to help shape your next design. That is why we will be highlighting each game entry by giving it a proper review in the days and weeks ahead.
Please show your support for all of these talented game designers by casting your votes, and your dollars, toward the Audience Prize, to be announced when voting ends tonight at midnight (GMT-5). Please refer to the Audience Prize page for links to vote for each of the games.
Our sincere gratitude to the kind folks at Adobe and ArcadeTown for making it all possible by sponsoring this competition!
Grats to winners :)
Sprout was my favourite too, but all the entries were very good.
Glad to hear it.
Congrats to Sprout! What a great game, and perfect for the theme.
Congrats to Jeff Nusz. His entry is really great.
Hooray! Congratulations to the winners.
I really wanted Sprout to win first place and Gateway II to win second. I'm very pleased to see that they did.
Well deserved first place, Utterly original!
Congrats to the winners.
Wow; to be honest this was exactly how I hoped things would turn out. Rockin'. Congrats to winners.
Congrats you guys! Awesome entries, awesome games!
Sprout was my husbands favorite too. I wonder if he voted for it instead of mine? hehe..
madd
Rings and Sticks was my favorite, I'm glad to see it got mentioned :)
Ah, I was kind of hoping for some Grow clones... :( I love Grow, need more Grow!!
I'm actually somewhat surprised that the JIG-chosen winner was declared prior to the end of the audience votes. I think it would have been nice to have them announced at the same time.
Or did you want to make sure that we understood that the JIG viewers weren't being unduly influenced by the audience votes? (:
Kat - Announcing the winners before the deadline of the audience voting is to give everyone that hasn't voted a little more time to make up their mind.
It is my hope that some people will be moved to vote after seeing the results; whether for one of the winners, or for one of their favorites that did not win a prize.
w00t for Sprout. It. Was. Amazing.
P.S. Jay, why do we need to put in our email address when we post?
Having your email address helps to reduce the amount of spam we get, and we do get a lot. Your email remains private and confidential, and it is never given out to anyone for any reason. It is for authentication purposes only.
I do need to get a privacy policy page up with all of that on it.
Yes, I thought sprout was an awesomely original game, I enjoyed it quite a lot.
I'm not suprised that was a dang good game! It's like a seed, learning to sprout into different plants, and wants to be an acorn, and he does it! Thanks goodness for modern game progammers!
I voted for Sprout (although I occasionally review here, I had no input into choosing the winners), and I'm happy with the outcome. I would like to put in a good word for PLANned, though, which is a great game in its own right, but had no chance of competing with the artistic heavyweights. Somebody who isn't me should give it a full review some time.
Congrats Jeff and Anders! Very well deserved.
Allthough I took game-development in my heart, I'm not really a gamer (what am I doing here? :)), but I had to play those two games from start to finish. Without an indepth analysis, it proves for me the quality that the best games have.
A big hurray for Jay too! Thanks for all your time and effort, and if it depends on me we can already start calling this the "legendary" gamedesign-competiton of Jay Bibby. Thanks!
What a wonderful (un)surprise. This game was too good not to win. I was rooting for this game from the get-"grow" *cheese*. By the way Jay, How does one become an occasional reviewer for this site? Not sucking up, but this is a daily site for me...thanks.
CONGRATS
I am happy to hear that the winners are games that I truly enjoyed, though there were also some other really fun games....
why do i find myself waiting impatiently already for the next game design competition (hmmmm, maybe if I learn flash then i could.... no i couldnt....maybe?.. nah...perhaps?... hmmmm better start learning........ :P)
Thanks for sponsoring a competition (without a cover charge as you mentioned in an earlier post) that creates such high quality games!
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