And the Winner is...

The judges have spoken and the votes have been tallied.  It was a very close competition, cheers to all of the entries!  Below are the top three winners from the Hackathon Game Competition.  If you participated and I have not yet reached out to you, please send me your contact information so I can put you in touch with our sponsors. My contact: ickydime[ at ]yahoo.com


THIRD PLACE WINNER: 

  

Earthquake

$50 donated by Mochi Media
Featured on GamesChart 

SECOND PLACE WINNER:

Mercy

$100 donated by Mochi Media

Featured on GamesChart 

GRAND PRIZE WINNER:

Food Bank Delivery by Jacob Grygowski

One Master Adobe Suite donated by Lee Brimelow & Adobe

One Pro License to GameBuilder Studio (once it is released)

Feature Review by JayIsGames 

Featured on GamesChart 

ALL PARTICIPANTS:

This includes the above winners along with: New Continents, The Feeder, and PYC - Pair Your Charity.

FDT 4 Pure donated by Bruno Fonzi of FDT ($129 value).

Invite to Private Beta to GameBuilder Studio 

Single Developer License to Push Button Engine's Isometric Component ($50 value).  

Recognized as Hackathon Supporters and projects will be displayed/promoted in our official records and online releases.

Voting Continues for People's Choice award.  We will announce the winner for People's choice at the beginning of March.

Thank you to all of the judges for taking the time to thoroughly play and critique each game and thus make this event a success: Jeff Fulton, Steve, Fulton, Iain Lobb, Keith Peters, and Squize.

New Job: Going Freelance / Indie (Game Development)

Roughly two weeks ago I parted ways with Sony.  It was a short ride, but very fruitful.  My exit was on the best possible of terms and I have been told the door is always open to return... which is the ideal situation whenever you part ways.  I believe my exit went smoothly mainly because I made sure I stayed on board with Wildlife Refuge all the way from start to finish and waited until we were in a stable maintenance mode before I made my departure.  I highly recommend making every possible effort to tie up any loose ends and meet any previous obligations before departing ways w/ an employer... although I realize that can not always be done.

Anyways, I learned a great deal from working with the Tucson Studio and feel I am much better prepared to face the gaming Industry.  Without Sony & the people I worked with there I do not believe I would have the confidence I do today to go into freelance/indie game development.

I can not speak about current projects at the moment, but I am sure I will open up more in the near future.

If you are working on any games (iOS Mobile or Flash), feel free to hit me up:  

Twitter

LinkedIn

Cheers!

Vote Now for Stanford Hackathon Game Competition

Stanford Hackathon Game Competition has come to a close.  The entries are finalized and I just now sent the entries to the judges.  I will contact the winners and post a blog post as soon as the votes are tallied, which may not be until late next week.

In the meantime, we need to determine the People's choice.  The People's choice will be awarded FDT 4 Max!  The way we will determine the winner is by using MochiPop:

MochiPop is a game popularity index which scores games based on a range of network data such how many plays the game has been getting. 

Basically, you vote by playing the game you like the most!   Since MochiPop is calculated over time we will let the voting continue until February 28th.  At that point we will freeze the MochiPop and calculate our People's Choice.

Here are the entriess:



PYC - Pair Your Charity

  

Earthquake

Food Bank Delivery

Mercy







The Feeder






New Continents






Cheers to everyone who took the time to partake in this charitable game competition... from the developers who entered, to the judges, to the sponsors.  We greatly appreciate all of the hard work!

More Reasons to Code!

Barry White of GamesChart recently passed along the press release below.  Being that he is a sponsor of Hackathon's Game Competition I am more than happy to share.  It also appears that you can reuse the same game or at least a variation of it for both competitions... thus more motivation for knocking out a Benevolent game by the 13th!  Good luck to all who enter, looks like there are some nice cash prizes for the winners:

----------------------

Come2Play and the Linkedin Flash Game Developers Group are launching the 2nd 'Games that Challenge the World Contest' for multiplayer games. Cash prizes totalling $10,000 will be awarded to contest winners!!

Prizes:

1st Place - $5,000

2nd Place - $3,000

3rd Place - $1,250

4th Place - $750

Contest Genre & Judging:

The contest genre is 'Casual Games' and submissions will be judged on the following criteria:

* Multiplayer playability for new and return players

* Replay ability of the game

* Design, sound and effects

* Concept and execution

Developers keep all rights to the games they submit and even previously released games can be entered. 

There was only a handful of entries to last years contest, so the chance of winning a serious cash prize is very high. Check out the winning entries of the 1st 'Games that Challenge the World Contest' here: http://bit.ly/gKLqz6 - If you've got a multiplayer game and you think you stand a chance of winning, why not submit your game now!

Full competition details available here - http://bit.ly/GCWContest