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

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...

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: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.

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!

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?