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?

[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.

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

[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.

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: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!