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."

Comments

Why influence them with copy locking?

[Thinkit3]

Those studio produce games that are copy locked. Information wants to be free, not tied up in annoying DRM and lengthy license texts. The new breed should be producing games for donations, in the new gift economy.

Micro$oft only?

[eclectic4]

So they only developed these games to work on Micro$oft products?

Were they a sponsor or something?

Yes, yes, I know, they developed for 92% (or whatever) of the computer user base, I still don't have to like it...

This is terrible!

[stratjakt]

Something about the RIAA!

The DMCA and my rights!

Bill Gate$! Micro$oft! Palladium!

WIFI

+5 insightful, please, I used all the standard karma buzzwords.

Xazzon best? I'd hate to see the worst!

[c0d3h4x0r]

What ever happened to game developers understanding that making a game perform well was the highest priority?

Aspiring developers back in the demoscene truly understood the art of coding. It was all about finding are more optimized, elegant solution than the previous guy, and making the computer pull things off that made the user's jaw drop. Coders used integer math and lookup tables in interesting ways to avoid performance-expensive floating point or trigonometric computations. They hand-optimized code and knew that a high-level library or language to produce the most elegant solution. They knew how to identify performance bottlenecks and improve them.

Developers now think it's okay to trust in powerful hardware, high-level languages, and abstraction layers like COM or OpenGL. Anything to make the job less mentally taxing. As a result, games continue to gradually decline in quality.

The gaming market has become more commercialized and less artistic, resulting in an abundance of crappy games that are designed and implemented by businessmen instead of artists and coders. The entire industry is headed down the tubes, just like ATARI in the 1980's.

There's one exception: Nintendo. They are still consistently producing artistic, quality games in-house. They may not survive as a hardware company, but they will certainly be one of the few successful game development companies to weather the market when the bubble bursts.