Three Thing Game Finals

Hardy survivors...

We had our Three Thing Game competition over this weekend. Just in case I wasn't busy enough writing poetry and whatnot. Anyhoo, great fun was had. A team of stalwart judges, including developers from Smashed Crab Studios, went through the final 17 teams and found us 6 finalists. As is the way of the competition, we had each team present their game at the aptly named finalist presentations. And here they are in no particular order.

Team: "I hope my friends don't bail on me"

Team "I hope my Friends don't bail on me", AKA Jason Powney, showed off the mayhem he had created from "chainsaw", "penguin" and "water". "Penguin Chainsaw Massacre" had tons of bloodthirsty action, with underwater mine hazards and even a sunken wreck. A very polished production.

Team: //TODO

Team //TODO, aka Daniel Masterson, had started of with "ASCII art", "sanctuary" and "error" and built, to our amazement, a 3D rendered graphical game displayed in a console window using text graphics. Something of an awesome technical achievement we reckoned. And the game looked fun to play too.

TEAM: aNOTHER BAD IDEA

Team "Another Bad Idea", aka Robert Chisholm and Adam Thornes had crafted a very neat top down fighting game from "Toilet Plunger", "Small Mammals" and, not surprisingly, "fighting". The game had frantic one on one action as the players acted out the eternal struggle between fox and rabbit using toilet plunger weapons.

Team: You Will Lose

Team "You will Lose", aka Joseph Edwards and Tomasz Kope,c had turned up the particle generators to the max and produced an atmospheric game based on "square", "random" and "shooter". Some nice coloured effects and randomly generated play areas made for good looking gameplay.

Team: One Musketeer

 Team "Four Musketeers" was down to one musketeer by Saturday lunchtime, but that didn't stop them producing a very neat four player shooter game from "Scrapper", "Wombat" and "Hull". The action was fast and smooth, with multiple weapons and you could even use the gun to jump. Can you spot how the thing "Hull" was used?

Team: Bad Computer Pun

Another technical tour-de-force from team "Bad Computer Pun, aka Nick Ross. We advise our students to use Three Thing Game as a place to test out hew game engines and Nick had certainly done that. Matlab is a serious mathematical package designed for serious mathematical stuff. Not for writing games. But the power of Three Thing Game compelled Nick to go against this and craft what is probably the first ever computer game written in Matlab. It is definitely the first ever Matlab game that involves "ostrich", "oasis" and "escape". And it looked pretty good too.

I didn't envy the judges their job as they went out to pick the winners. Thanks go to Warren Viant, Derek Wills, Lindsay West, Jon Purdy, David Parker and the Smashed Crab crew for giving up a Saturday afternoon to help out. Anyhoo, after much detailed discussion they come up with a first and second places, plus a technical achievement award.

First place went to "I hope my friends don't bail on me". The game was commended for the high quality of gameplay, completeness and the way it had stuck very well to the three things.

In second place we had"Another Bad Idea". Their game was singled out for the fun multi-player action and great looking graphics.

The award for Technical Achievement goes to //TODO. You just don't expect people to use shaders in ASCII art games. Awesome stuff.

I'm going to be chasing the teams for videos of their games and I'll update this post with more details when I get them.

Thanks to all the judges, to Lee Stott from Microsoft and Simon Jackson from MonoGame for dropping by and taking a look. And thanks to David Glover for making the Fenner Lab work so well and allowing us all in.

The next step for the teams is to get their game published. I'm going to be running some sessions about game publishing, keep an eye out for them.