And the winner is...
Today a very special Casual Gameplay Design Competition comes to a close, one dedicated to the realm of interactive fiction. We are very fortunate to have received so many excellent entries, and we are grateful to the development community for taking on our challenge.
We are here to honor all of the games that were entered, as well as award a few prizes, too. Thanks to our kind and generous sponsors: Armor Games and their continued unwavering support for our competitions (Thanks Dan!); and to everyone at Casual Gameplay for just being awesome. It is due to the efforts of all these people that we have the following prizes to award, so please show them your kind support as well.
This time we left the judging up to the JIG community, and all the games were scored based on theme, appeal, fun, composition, and technical merit. After all the scores were tabulated there was one clear winner. However, the next 3 games were just too close to call. Therefore, we are calling 2nd place an even tie between 3 games, and we will distribute the 2nd and 3rd place prize money evenly between them.
- First Place ($1,000):
- Hoosegow by Ben Collins-Sussman and Jack Welch
- Runners-up ($250):
- Fragile Shells by Stephen Granade
- Dual Transform by Nigel Smith (aka Andrew Plotkin)
- Party Foul by Brooks Reeves
Once again, congratulations to everyone who submitted an entry!
Following is a list of the top 10 games by score:
- Hoosegow
- Fragile Shells
- Dual Transform
- Party Foul
- Roofed
- Ka
- Monday, 16:30
- The Usher
- Into the Open Sky
- Lurid Dreams
We have published the community scores in a spreadsheet showing the average scores in each category for each entry. Look for reviews of the top games here on Jayisgames.com in the coming days and weeks.
There were some amazing entries for this competition - I hope that we get to see other work from the submitting authors in the future! Thanks to all the authors for making this a wonderful ride!
Thanks so much to everyone who played and rated my game "Into the Open Sky". I learned a lot from this competition and have plans for bigger and better things in the future.
P.S. Congrats to the winners, all of the winning games were fantastic.
Your welcome ottoman, and thanks to everyone who participated and played. Not only did I try and learn how to make games, but even enjoyed others games too, this was another great Casual Gameplay Design Competition.
Hoosegow had a lot of fun "flavor." I googled Hoosegow! But I was frustrated at inconsistency with the commands. Sometimes you didn't need a preposition, sometimes you had to use the right one...
Example: blow berry at coffee
Likewise, the look command was odd. Couldn't
look office
Also, a problem with the window:
I couldn't find the barrel with any look command (down, outside, etc) without already knowing the barrel was there. Maybe I missed a command...
Not to point out the obvious, but the formatting of the article is a bit off. In the list I think Jay put an extra [enter] in front of "Roofed" and therefore the line above is 1. [blank] with the next line reading "Roofed" without a number in front. In total the 5. is replaced with 1. and an extra enter.
[It was actually a missing </a> tag in the Party Foul link. Thanks for pointing out the issue, as none of the browsers I use displayed any problems with the list. -Jay]
I'll echo what Ax and AbstractCloud said. :)
Congrats to those who won and those who placed. Nicely done.
Thanks, also, to everyone who played "The Usher," my and Branden's game. We certainly had fun creating it for the competition and learned a lot about game-creation.
Thanks for hosting, and I am delighted to have placed as well as I did. I didn't have a chance to play all the games during the judging period, but I know there was a fierce tide of talent out there -- and not all of it people I know from the IF world.
This has been fun, and I hope it turns into a semi-regular tradition.
Well done to the winners and all the entrants! And thanks for such a great competition, even if not everyone is into IF.
I hope I'll have time to make an IF game one day...
@jimbog: "I hope I'll have time to make an IF game one day..."
Oh, it takes more than one day! :)
Seriously, though....
This competition was a blast! Huge thanks to the hosts, sponsors, and especially to everyone who played our games!!!
Thanks to Jay and crew for the competition, and congratulations to the entrants. I'm thrilled at my placement, especially given the tough competition. I'm doubly glad to see so many good games coming from people I haven't seen writing IF before.
I have to second, third, and fourth everyone's excitement about the competition. I'm really humbled myself, as I somehow managed to "squeak" in there under the wire so to speak. This was an awesome competition, and as a new author myself, it was the best introduction to writing IF I could have hoped for. Thanks for everyone who played the games and my fellow competitors for creating some truly awesome stuff! Thanks Jay!
Thanks for hosting and making IF accessible to a wider audience. I've wanted to write IF since I wrote a short branching text adventure in 1991 (in HyperCard!). Two months ago I still had never written any other IF, and this contest was the inspiration I needed to finally learn Inform. Thanks also to the Inform7 development team for a polished and powerful language, and to Jim Aikin for his Handbook, a great companion to the manual. Thanks to the other game authors for sharing their excellent stories through interactive fiction. Yay!
I completely missed this entire competition, having been away for a while, but it looks like it was great. It's exciting to see well-known names in the IF community like Andrew Plotkin and Stephen Granade, as well as a lot of other authors.
I'll definitely have to take my time and browse through the entries.
Update