Well I'm done. I spent this week end adding the last few features and running extensive play testing. I am now officially sick of playing my entry. I set the difficulty such that I could easily get a perfect score, but if I purposefully played badly I would barely win. I chose to err on the side of simplicity since by now I know all the little tricks. What is easy and intuitive from me will probably confound a first time player. I would have liked to get some external testing done, but the rules being what they are prevented me from releasing my WIP's publicly. As it stands I am very satisfied with my entry.

For those of you still chugging away at your entries I wish you the best of luck. It has been a pleasure coding against you guys (and girls). I guess it is frowned upon posting specifics of my game on this thread, so if any one wishes to compare notes about our entries PM me.

All that is left to do is drink the celebratory Thai Ice Tea for a completed project. To all my fellow game makers ***Chears***.

ahahahaha my game can be called "finished" now... although is full of bugs =(((( =(((((( and the music is crappy :P but hopefully it won't be on the last place

I surrender, that´s what I get for leaving everything to the last moment, as always, I hope I can at some point show up what I did so far.

OddGoo:
I surrender, that's what I get for leaving everything to the last moment, as always, I hope I can at some point show up what I did so far.

Ha, me too. :p

I could keep going, but I'm really tired. Better to save the game for later, after sufficient playtesting, and then release it on my own, with my own graphical style. Who knows, maybe Yahtzee will still want to review it, even outside of the contest. :)

I uploaded what I did. I'll post more about it tomorrow since it's 2:30 am here.

Good luck to everyone that entered a game, I'm excited to see what everyone else has managed to do, I'm sure theres some awesome enteries.

uploaded mine too... good luck to everybody else :P

Ugh...you stinkers got lucky. I came down with a cold on Friday. So my last big push to finish was tranformed into a wheezing, hacking stumble. I did finish, and upload my entry, so you didn't get THAT lucky. But I had to scrap the entire last section of the game for a much less satisfying conclusion. Very sad. The best laid plans, I suppose.

Still, it is good to have the contest behind me, and I look forward to seeing the results. I feel like I've gotten a genuine taste of what it's like to work on a title as an actual game developer. (tight deadlines, working with someone else's material, bug testing, slashing features, etc...) I feel like I've learned a lot. An effort like this really makes you appreciate what professional developers go through.

Richard Kain:
I feel like I've gotten a genuine taste of what it's like to work on a title as an actual game developer. (tight deadlines, working with someone else's material, bug testing, slashing features, etc...) I feel like I've learned a lot. An effort like this really makes you appreciate what professional developers go through.

Definitely. That's probably the most important part, right?

Anyway, I'm really looking forward to seeing everyone's entries! Can't wait until November 16th... :)

I got a genuine taste of what it is to take on why too much. I unfortunately didn't finish my game, so I submitted what it would look like if it was being played (ultimate shame). So everyone who did enter in a game is very lucky since it probably would have been up there with the best of them if I say so myself.

I don't know what everyone else did for their game, I'm really interested in seeing since my platform game wasn't finished in the time we had and I wasn't the only one working on it. One of the consolations is that I can talk about what I did since I didn't submit a game. My only hope now is that the game that does win, blows me away, or else I'll be shattered thinking what could have been if I won.

In the end I'm kind of happy with what I managed to do since it's the first game I've ever produced. I hope everyone else had fun on their games and my the best game/s win! I look forward to seeing everyone else's games.

All the entries are in. We will have a winner by November 16th! Thanks to everyone who has participated!

After judgment has been made, will we have the chance to fix bugs or add content? Assuming you guys are going to let people see it.

yeah i have the same question as badmonkey91....

wordsmith:
Damn, I guess I'd better start learning how to code flash xD Anyone got any free programs I can use for it?

Try Game Maker. You can make games without any code.

Now that the contest is over, can we get a count of the total number of submitted entries? The time between now and Nov 16th is going to drive me nuts. I would not mind knowing how many other people are going nuts as well.

Yeah...

MOAR INFOZ.

I'm really interested in what's going on with the contest!

I'd like to know too, I don't have many illusions about winning but I'd still like to know how many entries there actually were :)

badmonkey91:
After judgment has been made, will we have the chance to fix bugs or add content? Assuming you guys are going to let people see it.

That would all depend on how many entries are submitted and if they have enough time to set up the website to host all the games. I'd really love to see all the games, but I'd take it that since ZP is so popular that they'd be a lot of people putting in games of varying quality. If they did put up games it'd be a select few that are better than the rest. Which would mean they'd be the ones being judged to win, so they wouldn't release that until the competition is over.

hamster mk 4:
Now that the contest is over, can we get a count of the total number of submitted entries? The time between now and Nov 16th is going to drive me nuts. I would not mind knowing how many other people are going nuts as well.

Again, since this competition would have somewhere in the hundreds on entries, they probably wouldn't release that information. Not only because it'd take a while to count them, but also because right now there in secretive mode about the entire competition. The last thing the Escapist want right now is for any rumors or top entries to be leaked by accident. Not only would they look unprofessional, it wouldn't be fair to all the people who entered in a game.

Plus it would start hype, which is annoying to control, boring since every game practically gets it and also just incase there's lots of hype about a bunch of games that aren't that great. If you remember the rules, (not that I imagine this would happen) the Escapist held the right not announce a winner if the standard of games wasn't high enough. But that clause is more of covering ones own behind, just like not releasing any information about what's going on behind closed doors.

The best advice I can give anyone who's anxious about finding out who will win is too find something else to take you're mind off it. You'll either go insane by the time the announcement comes around or will have been thinking about it so much you just won't care anymore.

Black Lord Titan:

*snip*

Again, since this competition would have somewhere in the hundreds on entries, they probably wouldn't release that information. Not only because it'd take a while to count them, but also because right now there in secretive mode about the entire competition. The last thing the Escapist want right now is for any rumors or top entries to be leaked by accident. Not only would they look unprofessional, it wouldn't be fair to all the people who entered in a game.

*snip*

The best advice I can give anyone who's anxious about finding out who will win is too find something else to take you're mind off it. You'll either go insane by the time the announcement comes around or will have been thinking about it so much you just won't care anymore.

I doubt there will be more than 50 entries for this thing. Granted this is only uninformed speculation, but only 6 of us actually announced in this thread we submitted anything. I took a count of people who said they were going to work on something and it came out to 46 people. However it is very unlikely all of them submitted. There could be a ton of people who submitted an entry but didn't talk about it on this thread, but once again I think that is unlikely.

You are right that I should find something to take my mind off this contest. It is just that working flat out on something for a few weeks kind of leaves me stuck in a rut when it comes time to stop.

Any way that is my bit of thread necromancy for the day.

I probably wouldn't have posted anything myself in this thread except I felt like keeping up to date with other people working on the contest and to give myself something to do before going to bed each night.

I once saw Yahtzee in an interview last year saying that ZP got something like 5 million viewers. If only .1% of those made a game that'd still be 5000 entries. Granted that I doubt that they'd get that many, but if you only take into consideration the amount of people that would post about what they're doing, then you'd only be counting a minority. My bet for the number of entrants is in the hundreds. I imagine one of the reasons right now that no info is being released is because everyone has their hands full going through all the entries weeding out the lower quality ones (like mine) rather than indulging people with information.

So I'm very curious! Is there any chance I can play any of the submissions?

While only 6 people actually announced, my bet is many more people didn't announce they were working on them. My guess is... 50-150 entries.

Yeah, ZP has 5 million viewers, but what percentage of them can code a flash game? Even .1% seems like a really large number. I don't think every 1/1,000 people could code, animate and complete a game.

My guess is its more like .01% or .001% i.e. 1/10,000 or 1/100,000 viewers.

We are going through the entries and looking into options for the event. That is all I can say for now but some cool ideas are being talked about with potential layout plans.

And yes, it is taking us time to go through them all but we appreciate everyone's patience.

We will have the winner announced the week of November 16th.

6 more days :D

They said the week of the 16th, they could postpone the announcement until the Zero Punctuation on Wednesday. Anyway I have moved on to the TIG Source Assembelee competition here:
http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=8751.0

I can't wait to see what you guys have come up with! I'm nowhere near competent enough with any form of programming to enter this but it seems from reading you guys have some interesting stuff in the works.

hamster mk 4:
They said the week of the 16th, they could postpone the announcement until the Zero Punctuation on Wednesday.

My guess is it will be the ZP review next week.

Uszi:

hamster mk 4:
They said the week of the 16th, they could postpone the announcement until the Zero Punctuation on Wednesday.

My guess is it will be the ZP review next week.

Seems possible, although maybe not. Anything to give Yahtzee a week off reviewing MW2 though...

finaly 16....

hopefully the winners will be announced today TT_TT i can't wait anymore :P

I was thinking of some game where you frequently use Z, S, D and C but cannot press X or else you die.

AndyVale:
I was thinking of some game where you frequently use Z, S, D and C but cannot press X or else you die.

The purpose of game development is not to punish the people who choose to play your games.

"The purpose of game development is not to punish the people who choose to play your games."

wellllll that depends =))

Any official word on when the announcement is going down? I've been patient up till now, but I'm starting to wet my pants in anticipation. And I'm at work. I can't afford to be sitting around in moist undergarments all day.

Being the positive person I am I'm sure they will announce at the very end of the week :)

So the winner will be chosen this week. So when is Yahtzee going to review it. Like in 2 weeks?