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KTH Game Awards Grande Finale
CoderByBirth writes "The winners of the KTH Game Awards, a game programming competition for students held in Sweden were announced yesterday at KTH (The Royal Institute Of Technology) in Stockholm. 25 teams participated in the competition, which was divided into two parts, where the first part was to create a Technical Design Document (TDD) and a Game Design Document (GDD) and the second was to complete a working game demo or prototype. The student submissions were reviewed by a jury consisting of employees from DICE (creators of Battlefield 1942, Pinball Dreams) and Starbreeze Studios (Outforce, Enclave) as well as a representative from KTH. You can download the top three submissions here."
Any of these game demos worth downloading? There aren't any descriptions on the site.
Were there any prizes for this competition? Do the winners get money to continue development or anything? The page is down now, but when I got to scan over it earlier I didn't see anything.
well, think of it this way....
suppose the promoters said "ok, now all of your programs need to be in COBOL, no exceptions!"
do you think they might be limiting their audience a little.
the point is creativity isn't limited to one language. they're looking for a new game, something that hand't been tried before. Don't cut their feet off by forcing them into one language.
you sound like one of those grumpy old men that bitch at "the kids with their damned rock music"
As for real world experience, limiting the language is just rediculous. Yes, in the real world, you get a job and you might only be allowed to use one language. however EVERY real world job doesn't use just one language. Don't shaft the people who know c++ just because you think it should be done in java, or vice versa.
Hell, although it's not comparable, I made a blackjack game in ruby just for shits and giggles.
the language that they choose shouldn't matter. it comes down to using the right tool for the job.
for some it's c++, or other's it's haskell, java or perl.
oh, and another point- you say to limit it to platform. Well, reading through the posts, one of the teams says they wrote it for solaris, linux and windows. So you're saying that they should have limited it to one platform? which one?
you say windows and you'll probably piss of a lot of slashdotters.
you say linux and it'll never make it mainstream.
Let them do what they want to do. if they make a great game, fine, if they don't, oh well. Let it be their choice.
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As with most student projects, it seems to assume that you have a pretty fast machine. I have a machine that can run Q3A reasonably and this little Zaxxon game gets 12fps on it. They didn't spend much time optimizing or testing on slow machines. Even at 320x240 (windowed) it runs like a dog. Also, the ship goes out of control after a while, with the point of view switching jerkily from one side to the other.
Some of you will say that I need a new machine, which is true, but for what this game is it could run a lot faster.
When I was in school we had an assignment to make an asteroids game. Most of the projects were barely playable they were so slow. There were only a few each quarter that were worth playing. Yet using the same computers my group made a 3d space fighter game in which you pilot a ship through an asteroid field instead of the usual top-down 2d asteroids. Not only was it more ambitious than the normal games, it ran faster too, because we cared about efficiency from the start and made sure it was playable. You can download the Windows port here. It isn't nearly as polished as the Zaxxon game, but it was a 2 week project, and was playable on a 60 MHz Mac Performa with no 3d acceleration.
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