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

What about Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess there should be a similar competition for Linux games. There are enough Windows games already. We need more for open-source platforms.

Re:What about Linux?

[Stary]

The competition was not only for Windows games. Our game (Velox) runs on Windows, Solaris and Linux, for instance. The competition page states a deadline for handin of a "PC or UNIX executable", and you might also note that one team has made a game for the Gameboy Advance.

Re:What about Linux?

[Blaine Hilton]

I all for Linux as much as the next person, but developers have to live too and they are going to develop for the market that has more potential buyers. Its the catch 22, more people need to use Linux before there are more good programs, and developers will not put as much effort into Linux programming until there are more people using it.

Need a calculator?

Re:What about Linux?

[porttikivi]

Yeah, but it escapes me, why the people who design the kernels, drivers, desktops, "system applications" and all that other open source stuff do not need to "make a living". Why the game designers are the only exception?

Re:What about Linux?

[Realistic_Dragon]

As long as the games are well written, they should be easily portable: They should be written in a cross platform language, like C++ (no, I don't mean Java - not until we all have P7 9000 machines!) which can be easily compiled on Windows or UNIX. They should be writen to use open standards as far as possible. Games that exploit OpenGL are easy to port, games that use the protritary, limited, locked down bodge of an API (biased? me?) known as DirectX are not. This way (as happened for UT2k3) games can be available on _both_ Windows and Linux for very little extra cost. It's a shame MS is trying to put a spoke in the wheel of this kind of thing, not only with Direct X and dropping where possible support of OpenGL (no OpenGL support in the XBox I see...) but also by offering developers great wodges of cash to develop nativly in DirectX and make the game available on the XBox first, ensuring that OpenGL games and Linux support are far less attractive than would otherwise be the case.

Re:What about Linux?

[GlassHeart]

it escapes me, why the people who design the kernels, drivers, desktops, "system applications" and all that other open source stuff do not need to "make a living". Why the game designers are the only exception?

Because a competitive (which does not even necessarily equal "good") game must be timely. A FPS game with bitmapped monsters and no ability to look around freely, such as the original Doom, has no way to survive in the marketplace today even if it was free. Since commercial games are written full-time (more than full-time, in fact), part-time developers cannot keep pace.

Today's games also require the services of musicians and artists, who are quite accustomed to receiving payment for their talents.

A kernel is much more of a static target than a game. It is also a task that is far more parallelizable, because device drivers are essentially independent pieces of code. Even then, support for newer peripherals (such as USB, btw) tend to lag commercial OSes by a great deal.

This is not to say there can't be a free game that is imaginative enough to counteract the part-time limitation. However, gems like Tetris (easy to code, sells very well) simply don't show up every year.

Demo Winners

[Anonymous Coward]

Any of these game demos worth downloading? There aren't any descriptions on the site.

How I feel about programming competitions

[A Proud American]

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.

Re:How I feel about programming competitions

[Timesprout]

and exactly how many competitions to code games in VB will you enter ?

A lot of game development involves pushing the boundaries. Its a lot easier and emminently more practical to do that when you are already familiar/expert with the technology.

In your job you are constrained to use what you are told but you were probably hired because you were at least familiar if not proficient in the organisations technology standards already, not becase they felt like converting a few perl codes to c++ gurus.

Re:How I feel about programming competitions

[Tet]

My boss never tells me to make a warhead however I want to -- there's always a specification of what technologies I must use.

Your boss tells you to make a warhead? Wow! Even when I worked for the Ministry of Defence, that never happened to me...

Re:How I feel about programming competitions

[grazzy]

how about working for the ministry of offence.. errr..
what would the deparment of DEFENCE do with a warhead..

Re:How I feel about programming competitions

[kingkade]

A lot of game development involves pushing the boundaries

Don't forget they require you to 'think outside the box', by 'reaching a new level of immersion', 'extending gameplay dynamics', and ...ack i just had a gag reflex kick in for no reason. i'll get back some more vapid catchphrases later...;)

Re:How I feel about programming competitions

[Lumpy]

My boss never tells me to make a warhead however I want to -- there's always a specification of what technologies I must use.

Your boss tells you to make a warhead? Wow! Even when I worked for the Ministry of Defence, that never happened to me...

well you know, things are very different in those terrorist organizations....

Abdul! Make the warhead purple! and we will call it the purple headed warrier to kill the american pigs with.

Allah will be pleased!

Re:How I feel about programming competitions

[morgajel]

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.

Re:How I feel about programming competitions

[justin_speers]

This isn't a programming competition!!! It's a game development competition. There is a HUGE difference there.

Their job was to come up with the best game, not the best technology. The technology is and should be irrelevent. There are tons of games out there for the game boy advance that are way more fun to play than Quake III, despite the different (inferior) technology used.

Bottom line: There's a difference between a game development competition and a programming competition.

The Winner

[CoderByBirth]

You can also download the winning game here:
Xazzon

Cool competition - Hard to Read

[hether]

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.

A what?

[Prince_Ali]

Design... document...? I know what the individual words mean, but taken together it sounds like nonsense!

Re:A what?

[stratjakt]

It is nonsense! Wonderful upper management nonsense!

If you've ever seen one, it reads like something from Lewis Carrol or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, or maybe more like a Dr. Suess poem.

Any prizes?

[fatwreckfan]

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.

Re:Micro$oft only?

[Stary]

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.

Those poor, poor students!

[HoldmyCauls]

...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!

NTH Game awards

[Andreas(R)]

NTH (Norwegian Institute of Science and Technology) also held a similar game award for student projects.

NTH is better than KTN :)

Xazzon review

[John Harrison]

So I managed to download and play Xazzon. It is what you would expect, a 3D version of Zaxxon. Pretty good for a student project, but it doesn't seem very efficient.

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.