Breakout: This time its personal! Your friends (and some precious ores) are trapped in the over-hanging blocks, and it's up to you and your bouncing pick-axe of destruction to bust them out. Each friend you rescue grants you a power-up option to use in future levels. Watch out for stalactites though! A very familiar, but very fun entry of CGDC9.

FrankenFriend is the RPG/Visual Novel tale of Frank Von Friendenstein IV, a eccentric youth with a passion for the sciences who lives alone in his mountain castle high above the village of Frankenfriendsylvania. Though for years, his education and "unorthodox" experiments have satisfactorily taken the place of social interaction, he's found that, as of late, he's been lonely. So it is with great trepidation that he heads to the village below looking for companionship. A CGDC9 entry with excellent characterization but more than a few glitches.

Make friendz in this monstrous puzzle game that has you chaining unhappy monsterz together. Created by Jean Privat for the 9th Casual Gameplay Design Competition's theme of friends, Monsterz has a simple presentation but offers just enough challenge to really make you think.

Never in history has one man worked so hard to collect so many that cared so little as to follow him properly. But that is just all part of the challenge in this noteworthy CGDC 9 entry. Zip through the colourful levels trying to gather enough friends to proceed, while trying to keep your massive human chain from blundering into dangerous obstacles.

What makes a friend, anyway? And what do your friends mean to you? In this simple platformer by Undi that explores the theme of "Friends" for the 9th Casual Gameplay Design Competition, your goal is to get to the top of the Professional Life... even if it means dropping everyone who ever mattered to you along the way.

Point and click your way through several screens in this follow-up to Johnny Why Are you Late. Pick up items and combine them to solve puzzles as they present themselves, with the sure knowledge that somehow, these unrelated tasks will somehow coalesce into your final goal of rescuing your friends. Johnny Why 2 finished a respectable fifth place in the tight race of CGDC9, and point-and-click fans won't want to miss this one.

Crafted in the style of classic 'choose your own adventure' games, Zebulon features the exploits of a somewhat wayward space crew. The story itself is relatively simple; you're the captain of a small ship that runs regular courier missions for Asmico, a delivery and service IT company. With you are your shipwright and communication officer; your shipright Hariett is a straight-laced, by-the-book stick in the mud while Reynolds, the communication officer, is unlikely to win 'Employee of the month' anytime soon. Your choices in your interactions with them, and certain events, will determine your outcome.

Best Friends Fighter isn't so much a game as it is a whimsically well-designed online toy by Glitchy Pixel. In a nutshell, Best Friends Fighter is what its name implies it to be: a beat 'em up game. The only thing is, you don't any actual control over the characters. Heck, I'm not sure if the characters could even be called characters. Instead of beefy, steroid-infused men and leggy women, Best Friends Fighter pits robotic entities comprised out of many, many blocks with faces against one another.

Fiends is best described as an innovative puzzle game masquerading as a roguelike RPG, and worst described as an unentertaining game, though you'll find that "unentertaining" doesn't enter into the equation. As the growing circle of friends makes their way from outer space to a castle to an abandoned marketplace, they'll encounter new fiends with different counterattack ranges, set up in all sorts of arrangements to create all sorts of puzzles, leaving you thinking constantly.

OneMrBean's first place award winning entry into the 9th Casual Gameplay Design Competition is a piece of interactive narrative about remembering the things that really matter in your life, and the people who gave them to you. You play as an initially morose fellow who takes you on a personal journey through his life and his memories, and offers up a simple but touching and surprisingly heartfelt experience that is wrapped up in a beautiful package.

Our 9th competition today is concluded with the awarding of prizes as well as honoring all of the games that were entered. The "friends" theme was represented well, and one entry moved our emotions and some to tears with its heartfelt symbolism and imagery.

Casual Gameplay Design Competition #9 games are now ready to play!! All entries are available to play immediately on the competition page. There is a place to enter comments for each game, so please use each respective thread to leave your kind feedback and constructive criticisms for the game authors. The competition period will span 3 weeks, and we will announce the winners of the competition at that time. If you wish to help judge the competition, read the rules and sign up here.

You have just under 24 hours left to get your games finished up and submitted in time for our 9th Casual Gameplay Design Competition. Remember that updates and bug fixes are permitted throughout the competition period, which begins on Tuesday and runs through December 6th. So get your games into a playable state and send them in. Don't forget to fill out the official CGDC9 Entry Form. Please be sure to read all the rules and guidelines for this competition before submitting an entry.

We are pleased to announce the next Casual Gameplay Design Competition! For CGDC #9 we are teaming up with our friends at Electronic Arts' EA2D studio and asking that you design a game around this theme: FRIENDS. You may use any browser-based technology platform you are comfortable with (Flash, Unity, Javascript/HTML5, etc.)! Please read the official competition announcement for all the rules and details.