Summer 2008 demos uploaded

Dear friends,

The 21 demos are uploaded to Acknex Unlimited (Au demo page)
We've got many impressive entries, so please take your time to download, test and rate them.

If you have sent a demo and you don't see it in the list, you have about 48 hours to contact me (the voting will start in 2 days).

Awesome I tested and played them all. Hard to choose a favourite! Good job everyone, and may the best win :P.

hum.. the art pencil is a nice.. pitty it doesn't allow us to draw..

I like king on wheels and A7titude.
Its hard to vote the better one.
This two games have good graphics, sound, gamedesign and gameplay.

yes this are my favorits,
but "knight on wheels" is boring when playing alone, but with a second player its very funny!!! ..and i am missing a you-have-won-screen

A7titude is nearly perfect, just performance and mouse-sensitve aren't the best...

i don't think, that a screensaver can win, because a game is much more interessting (because you have something to do^^)

Graphically I love the screensaver from Ulrich Seiffert.

The games all have issues and lead to frustrating points (missing backwards gear in KOW, slow and stuttering control of A7titude and so on).

a reverse gear would require 5 more lines or so but personally i don't miss it much so i didn't add it. you can always reset the vehicle to the last position on the track if you are stuck somewhere. or the other player could pull you out with the tractor beam. adding ai for single player gameplay is left as an interesting exercise for the user.

The screen saver is very goood i like it, but well its just a screensaver, has no gameplay.

A7titude its a nice game, with nice design, good concept. eh.
I like the pencil art too, and many others hard to vote

[Space travel]
Did you notice that you can listen to your own music (mp3) by dropping the songs in the screensavers directory?

this makes it a lot more individual...

[Art Pencil]
I haven't added drawing, because it uses lots of panels and start s lagging only because of function count overload (at my pc above 2000 'ticks'(panels) ).
Of course, I can upload it and post link too, if you want.

I love A7titude, it's made very proffesional, but I think adding some mipmapping will be nice. Btw, it's code is nearly unreadable. (Need to do lot's of find\replace to understand something.)

knights on wheels #1
A7titude #2
bulldozer #3

[bulldozer]

yeah [bulldozer] is great

Hello,

in my opinion the Demo of bulldozer is the best one.

grinseengel

1.Knights on wheels
2.a7titude
3.Bulldozer

[Bulldozer] is awesome, it makes really fun.

[Bulldozer] is really good, and a7titude is good, too.

[Bulldozer]

The demo that I spent the most time with is King of Frogs.
Very interesting game concept. Although, I am not sure whether the functions are consistent.
I tested it today again with my son, and he discovered that you need only about 20 of power and almost the whole desktop to move the mouse from the left to the right to get "motivation" of 500 and above, although 500 was better than higher, because the jump lasts longer with higher "motivation".
Our record is one jump with about 16 seconds.

woo it was a lot of demos to play/see.

i really like a7titude,knights on wheels and weird art pencil. Slin's trees are awesome but i guess it is down because it is not a complete game.

my vote goes to bulldozer.

from the gameplay point of view, i found "bulldozer" the most convincing.

So, I've tested all demos. The entires I lik most are a7itude, bulldozer, knightsonwheels and take it easy.

#4 Bulldozer
It's a nice game idea. I like this kind of mini games very much. But there is something special missing. But I can't tell what.

#3 Take It Easy
Nice idea to script take it easy as watchable game. The programming is done great, but the game itself is too boring for watching.

#2 Knights On Wheels
I like this game very much, especially the big canyon-like racing track. But the steering in curves are a bit annoying. The vehicle turns too slow.

#1 a7itude
Very nice game idea. It's well coded and the graphics are also very nice. I had very much fun with this game.

So my vote goes to a7itude

BULLDOZER has by far the best gameplay...in my opinion It feels very "complete" in all important computer game aspects...and plays smooth

1. Knights on wheels
2. Bulldozer
3. a7titude

If readable code has any importance in the judging then a7titude is out though.

This has been a nice contest with many nice entries to learn from. Unfortunately I didn´t have enough time to take part.

If any of you people get new accounts and vote more than once I will hunt you down and hurt you bad. That includes you Europeans and Russians also, I will get you, even in Siberia I will get you so everyone be fair or else!

Yeah! Strange things seem to be going on here.

da_lama (Member #11630)
Kahaestoeh (Member #11629)
none (Member #11628)
atayby (Member #11627)
calz054 (Member #11625)

One entry has exactly 5 more votes after those new users have registered. Is this a coincidence?

I think so .
But hey, be fair pls.

my favorits are a7titude and Knights on wheels, i think them will win!
but i looked into the code...
and somethink like

is not nice - this way it is possible to program whole games
(i know the 10kb-limit)

Nope, the IPs are different. Theese 5 people are from 3 different countries.

Yeah, it´s very difficult to use some proxy server or ask some friends to vote for you. :p

yes, and because of that discussion shortly before the deadline i have provided a second version which doesn't use obfuscated code and tricks like that. have you seen my second version? i only had to leave away the sound effects and the dust to stay within the limits.

i like your bulldozer game too.

such things happened with every contest poll so far. i think that the popularity of the user in the community plays a big role too so the result always will be kind of unfair. george and the jury should take the poll as a very rough guide only.

Maybe only "special selected" users should be able to vote in the future?
E.g. more than 10 posts or more than 2 months registered?

@Ventilator:

sry i didn't saw your second code - so it is nice, but there are much more using codes like this. I didn't thinks that that was the meaning of the contest!

But: "the winners will be decided by our jury (51%) and by the votes at Conitec's forum (49%)"
so the jury decides whats the best

Yeah, everything is a bit irritating. The three most voted entries are also praised for its gameplay and the presentation, but not for their coding. I like that Vent' made a second version that has the same feature set as the "obfuscated" one but still not exceeding the two limits.

If I would'nt had wrote my own entry I would be unsure if I would vote for it. Sure, it's tricky ^^ but I just use common tricks to encapsule instructions and only some #define tricks to save some bytes. So, most people are just convinced by the gameplay and the imagery (or people who just like the game... in my case the whole Binärpilot community (which is small.. btw)) and so on.

Also, it could be difficult for people who are not so into programming to see how nice some things are solved to save semicolons.

Its hard to decide I think and it seems that most people just vote for the gameplay part of the particular game. That is not the way the contest has been intended, but who cares.

The voting is always a difficult thing and Vent is right about this. So, here my suggestion for the next contest(s): make 3 prizes chosen by Conitec and one user award decided by a poll like this. The official prizes are higher than the user award (because no one can cheat or the voting is influenced by other circumstances - AND then it is more attractive for developers) and the user award a bit lower,.. like these vouchers or something else.

It is difficult to vote the code, is much easyer to vote for the gameplay.

And the contest-entrys with gameplay are more interssting, you have to spend more time on it when playing!

I don't think its necessary to be a good programmer, most important is the idea (like yours - heelx) behin a project. After the contest deadline i hade some (hopeful) other good ideas...

So you have invited the Binärpilot community over here, eh? :p


edit:
Oh!
http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=498299
http://www.gameproducer.net/forums/showthread.php?p=7404

I wouldn´t really call this cheating but it isn´t really fair either.

For me HeelX is OUT!

mercuryus

yes that isn't fair, but i think that he is not alone with that!

but his game is quite good, so i wouldn't say that he is OUT, don't forget the Jury decides to 51%!!!

History showed us the jury decides with the crowd.
What HeelX (and maybe others) did is not fair - but HeelX was that stup... to get cought. Of cause it's not illegal - but unfair.

This way the 3DGS contest slightly becomes a "activate as many voters as possible however you can" contest.

Poor thing...

For me HeelX did someting reprehensible and the votes for his entry are worth nothing to me!

For me it is okay if I'm out. It is your choice. You like it and that is enough for me. Nevertheless, I had no feedback over there so it doesn't matter if you burn me. I will still give my best on future projects and you can't say that making that game is cheated, too.

This has been done with the last contest (and with earlier contests as well for sure) and for this reason I lost one place. Well I did not really complain as I was just too lazy to post in other forums to register. I wasn't going to win 1st price anyway.

Face it - this will always happen, and it's not forbidden either.
The discussion comes up every contest, and Conitec should really re-think the role of user votes when quality of entries is even.



Sorry for not downloading, playing, watching, commenting your hard work. Currently I have no proper internet access, so I can only do some basic stuff, like wasting time in forums

Go bulldozer! \o/

But it is disappointing! Very disappointing.

Maybe, in business it is common, that the success counts solely - not my attitude though, because it spoils my feelings and my motivation.

But, in a contest like this? It is for honor. Does anyone feel honor when he knows it is _not_ only by the free appreciation of the voters?

hey, what is going on here? this was SO unneccessary... bow and retreat

I think the 100 semicolons are just a limit for the code, and not the factor that should be rated. If you made a beautiful game with very simple code, then great, it deserves to be rated high.

as kasimir said, conitec has a huge say in it. until we saw amy's incriminating evidence we still saw much praise for a7titude. we have a gradual public voting system but in the end the jury can choose whichever winner they want; if they look at this thread and feel that one deserves less of their support than it may have gotten in an a7-community-only vote, i'm sure they'll act somewhat appropriately.

it's totally fair to point out that HeelX has gathered support from elsewhere, but it's not fair to act so sour about it.

there are at least a couple of entries that deserve first-place one way or another, and in the end it'll only be the deserving that'll make the cut.

julz

Thats one of the primary reasons I voted for Ventilator's code, because he made it all easy to understand and thus we would be able to implement it in our own game.

Plus his game was fun and original. Having a tractor beam to pull opponents was creative. It was also humorous because it involved the "gamestudio knights". So it was funny, creative, fun, and had useable code. Pretty good.

I did think that ventilator should have put more work into making the level look better and the tractor beam could look a little cooler, but since I can adapt the code if I wanted to it is no problem.

I thought a7itude was a very creative and nice looking game, better looking design than knights on wheels, but the voting should have stayed in the community as far as I am concerned. We all could get our friends to make accounts and vote. But its not fair.

I think next time voting should be restricted to people with over 100 posts.(I dont know how they would implement that with ubb)

Maybe the best solution would be for people just to make a post of who they want to win, that way we could see who voted and why.

or make a forum only for priviledged members, like the beta forum. But that is a littlebit cumbersome.

two things i like to say:
is not nice that Heelix use this way to win, also the code isn't nice,
but it is important to underline his idea - this is perfect! (in my opinion)
it is also fact, that the idea is quite simple - and this was the meanining of the contest! he packed a whole/closed game into 100 lines!



Yes i think too, his car-physik is very nice and usefull!
His code (without sounds) is very simple and easy to understand!
But i think his game is unfinished, i miss something like a "winner-screen" and in my opinion the tractor-beam isn't necassary (i don't use them)

My opinion on cheating: It's understandable that the most participiants are angry about people which are cheating. But in the Conitec contest the bigger part is jugded by Conitec, as someone already mentioned.
Some years ago I did take part in the Conitec contest. After the voting my entry was on the 2nd or 3rd place. But together with the Conitec judge I was on the 1st place and won.
So you see, even if it is not nice if others cheating, don't worry about it, Conitec will be choose the best one

there is a winner screen. didn't you see that "winner!" shows up? i didn't think that a fullscreen panel is necessary (i dislike such things) and wanted that it's possible to continue driving around after the race.

aren't you contradicting yourself?

yes, sry but on the one hand he had a simple game-idea, which should not need/use much code, on the other hand he used to much code... for functions and so on...

he should have done his game without some futures!
like Knights on wheels, Ventilator includes a second versions with some extra features -> i think thats Right!!!

Many people had a simple game idea.
Btw, Kasimir, you could save yourself some lines and could added more levels if you used TEXT* object as string array instead of wasting semis and space by 'if (lvl_ptr.skill1 == 0) {level_load ("level1.WMB");}'

I'm using it all the time. And it's not cheating, just optimizing your code.
Now it won't get too usefull...

Thx, yes but i am not familyar with c-sript, so i have to learn the new synatx and so on!
But its nice, actually its exact a string-array i am searching for^^

When does the Contest / the Poll ends???

Afaik 7th July.

1. A7titude.
2. Knights on wheels.
3. Bulldozer.