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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."
I guess there should be a similar competition for Linux games. There are enough Windows games already. We need more for open-source platforms.
Any of these game demos worth downloading? There aren't any descriptions on the site.
I don't like when programming competitions allow coders to select their own technologies.
If the goal of these competitions is to foster new programming talent, I think it's best to give them an exact specification document detailing exactly what technologies (languages, platforms, hardware) need to be used.
The real world of professional programming generally tends to involve projects with unchangable parameters. My boss never tells me to make a warhead however I want to -- there's always a specification of what technologies I must use.
You can also download the winning game here:
Xazzon
This is a very neat competition. I enjoyed reading through the team's descriptions and goals for making their games. Everything from making a game that's easy to start but hard to stop, to making a 3D only game, etc.
Just wanted to mention too that this bright purple/blue color still makes reading game stories very hard on the eyes. I thought after the huge number of posts lamenting this fact that perhaps the editors would actually change it. Don't know what I was thinking.
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do.
Design... document...? I know what the individual words mean, but taken together it sounds like nonsense!
Slashdotter are stupid and biased.
Dang, the server's already slashdotted..damn browser crashed when I tried to go to amazon while downloading. Hmm... Maybe amazon doesn't want me to play games o_O
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.
No, see a previous thread on the same subject. And yes, MS was a sponsor, which really made no difference since they weren't judging the entries. Note the team making a game for the Gameboy Advance, for instance.
Tomorrow will be cancelled due to lack of interest
My favorite line:
Windows and Linux can coexist on the same computer. For additional information, refer to your Linux documentation.
Hahahaha.. I bet they sell a ton of licenses of XP to people who've pulled out all their hair looking for their "Linux documentation"
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
KTH is just sucking up his ass in any way they can, even by giving him a honorary doctorate after Linus got it from Stockhom university, KTH's rival (Slashdot covered Linus).
It's all in the money.
Nothing spells "professional" like a giant freakin' flaming 750 pixel logo.
...a game programming competition for students held in Sweden...
If the poor bastards are being held in Sweden, it's the least that can be done to raise their esteem!
Let's get Tina Yothers et al together to try and free them!
Emacs: for people who just never know when to
now there was a game. The original and best pinball game ever. I still play regularly using winfellow. Lets all here it for PD.
I'm smarter than the average bear.
when i first read that subject i thought it said cock licking.
I'm smarter than the average bear.
NTH (Norwegian Institute of Science and Technology) also held a similar game award for student projects.
:)
NTH is better than KTN
Its been /.'ed. Any mirrors?
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
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.
Lasers Controlled Games!
Dunno if needed :) -But anyway:
http://multimedia.campus.luth.se/kth_games/
Just a FYI, for those of you unfamiliar with the demosceme. (fastracker = .xm format mod music).
Yup, Starbreeze was formed out of the former demo group Triton, the creators of, among others, the legendary Crystal Dreams and Crystal Dreams II demos.
Back then, Triton captured the essence of module tracking with their FastTracker & FastTrackerII, a very advanced implementation of the old amiga protracker concept. Their Fasttracker was, for many years, the biggest rival of Scream Tracker and Impulse Tracker, and a lot of musicians preferred it's simple but efficient interface above all other trackers.
When Triton became Starbreeze, they had a lot of problems finding publishers for their first game 'Into The Shadows'. Parts of that never-published game were used in 'Sorcery', a 1st person RPG to be published by Gremlin Interactive, but also these plans did not go forward, as Gremlin was bought by Infogrames and they traditionally fucked up one more development studio. Finally, Swing Entertainment (Conspiracy Games) had the courage and the guts to publish the now 3rd person RPG 'Enclave' on 3 platforms, and the game gained reasonably good acclaim. Unfortunately, Swing went bankrupt 3 months later. Starbreeze is now said to be working on Enclave 2.
With great power comes great electricity bills.
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.
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
I second that!
Yeah, that's it. Moderate my post as "Troll" just because you disagree with the content, regardless of the fact that it's not a troll and is merely an honest statement of my genuine opinion.
Dickheads.
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.