Casual Gameplay Game Design Competition #5

They're at it again in a seemingly endless series. Jayisgames' new Game Design competition gives you eight weeks to design a Flash game with the theme "Upgrade". There are great new prizes but also new entry requirements, so be sure to read the entry form carefully. Good luck!

4th Casual Gameplay Design Competition - entries unveiled!

Entry time is over and playtime has begun! Jay will be posting a new entry every few hours or so, so start playing and thinking about how you're going to distribute your votes. For anyone new to JayIsGames.com or the competition, basically, Jayisgames puts out a call for entries with a theme for game designers to integrate into their game - this time around, it's "ball physics". It's up to the designer how they do this, and following the theme slavishly won't guarantee them a prize. Aside from the main prizes, this year sponsored by Sierra Online, ArcadeTown, ArmorGames and FreeworldGroup, the real excitement for mine is the Audience Prize, which is composed of donations by JayIsGames readers. (That would be you.)

So far, I'm liking:

Roll

Starts off annoyingly easy - quickly becomes annoyingly hard. Nice, clean, Nitrome-style graphics.

Factory Balls

ZOMG! A Bart Bonte game I don't hate!

Day of the Bobteds

By the eeeeeeeeevil genius who brought you Hapland, an elegant little game with polished graphics that might disappoint Hapland fans (you may be comforted to know that they look a bit Ferry Halim, so all is not lost).

Kaichou

Bless you! No major strategy or effort here, just shoot black balls to turn them into pretty flowers.

Mr. Mothball

From the artistic vision that brought you Submachine and Daymare Town, the virtue of this game lies not so much in the motion physics as the sound. Jump on the blocks (what do you think they are made of?) and listen to the noise it makes.

Brownie Motion

Amateurish graphics and a gameplay so simple you can feel your brain getting smaller as you play, yet weirdly compelling. If lopsidation can just team up with an artist and/or musician to make the interface just a tiny bit less crap, we could be onto a winner.

For my money, the winner so far is:

Angular Momentum

It's easy to learn, quite polished in its presentation, addictive and fun. A few physics nerds over at Jayisgames have complained that the movement is inaccurate, but I don't think that interferes with the enjoyment of the game itself.

Play games, find your purpose in life

This is cute: play ten old-skool computer games such as Simon, Snake and Duck Hunt to identify your career path. You don't have to become a member of OKCupid to play, unless you want to keep your score.

The Fun Way to Pick a Career Test written by harpoleers2 on OkCupid, home of the The Dating Persona Test

Free Play Indie Game Developer Conference

If you've come here from Jayisgames.com, chances are you're in the US and can't attend this event, but you may get some joy from looking through the schedule and blog for the Next Wave Free Play Independent Game Developers Conference. If you are in the area, it's a one-day conference held in Melbourne, Australia, with a bargain basement price.

Topics include:

Can't Touch This, 11am
Move on from game pads, keyboards and mice and learn
how to create sensor-driven games.

Get Your Feet Wet, 1pm
Create a game in eight easy steps, without programming. (3D Game Studio)

The Best Things in Life are Free, 2pm
This session will provide an overview of the various open
source technologies and engines available to developers.

Playing with Pixels and Politics, 3pm
What is the potential for games to say something other than "BOOM!"?

18 August 2007 at ACMI
9:30am to 8:30pm
Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI)
Federation Square, Flinders Street, Melbourne
$20 Full
$15 Concession & Student
03 8663 2583 for bookings
gamers@nextwave.org.au
www.nextwavefreeplay.blogspot.com

JayIsGames Flash Game Design Competition #4 - "Ball Physics"

We've only just concluded the third competition, but already JayIsGames has announced the fourth Flash Game Design Competition, with a nice distant deadline of October 1st 2007, and the theme "Ball Physics".

I am a bit Beavis and Butthead, and have an idea for a game that involves a wet, twisted-up towel...

Yay Wouter!

Congratulations to Wouter Visser, who won both the JayIsGames.com Casual Game Design Competition #3 AND its Audience Award with Gimme Friction Baby (named for a Turbonegro song - you frickin' rock, Wouter!).

If you enjoyed the soundtrack to Gimme Friction Baby (ironically, the music is kind of shoegazey, quite the opposite of what you'd expect from the title) the band responsible are We vs. Death and their website offers many free downloads. May I recommend:

Wake 44 (the song used in Gimme Friction Baby)
(yes,) we went to Novgorod
mkultra

JayIsGames.com are already gearing up for the Casual Game Design Competition #4, with a longer lead time and even more valuable prizes. If you're an aspiring game designer, keep an eye on the JiG site for an announcement of the theme. Hopefully it'll be more useful than "replay"!

JayIsGames Competition #3!

The third annual JayIsGames Flash Game Design competition - themed "Replay" - is parading the entrants as we speak. It's too late to enter, but you can play the games and vote for the winner of the Audience Prize. The first and second prizes are chosen by JiG reviewers, but the Audience Prize is chosen by PayPal donations of at least USD $1.00 and can add quite a jolt of cash to a talented designer's prize. Alternatively, it can do Great Justice for a designer who for some bizarre reason wasn't chosen by the staff judges.

Here's some of my picks from this year's entrants:


Karma fuses the concepts of reincarnation and the Western 7 Deadly Sins to create a game where the aim is to clear your sins and reach salvation with as few reincarnations as possible. It has a few bugs which can make it frustrating to play, but the music, sound effects and visuals are gorgeous and soothing enough to prevent you from hurling the keyboard through the monitor.


Tonypa's Yalpeyalper is a simple but cute game where you need to eliminate all of the squares in the grid by setting off a chain reaction. Be careful, though - if you're wrong, you'll end up having to replay all of the levels you've previously won.


In Paracaidas (parachute in Spanish), you guide a parachutist safely to the target. It doesn't sound like much, but it's beautifully designed and fun to play.


Wouter Visser's Gimme Friction Baby leaves it to you to work out how to play it. Once you do, you simply MUST go back and try to beat your high score... goddammit...


In Timebot, you stand on panels to open doors, etc. Then you kill yourself and reincarnate to actually go through the doors. It's a pretty cool game.

If these games don't do it for you, there's plenty more at JayIsGames!

games!

Understanding Games
This excellent little series, apparently inspired by Scott McLeod's legendary Understanding Comics, is a kind of half-game half-Flash movie experience that explains the principles that make games worth playing. That link is to the first installment, but links to parts 2, 3 and 4 are on that page. Each Flash movie is mostly just that, but at some point in the presentation allows you to handle the 'game' to experience what the presenters, Bub and Bob, are talking about.

Free Pooky
Great little point and click that's easy enough for nuff-nuffs like me, with an in-game walkthrough that reveals only as much as you need. Vibrant illustration is cheery for a blah day like today. The Worteldrie website has a lot of good kids' games as well.

OMG Scary Room!!1!
AKA AN Escape Series 2.5. Parody of point and click games which is logical (ish), fun and amusing to my mental age of 13. Jayisgames wouldn't run this on account of it contains words like "ass" and has a dildo in it, but they run horror games with severed heads! And, come on, you totally want to play a point and click with a dildo in it.

Argblargs
This is one of those games where you register and create an avatar. As you play games and engage in PvP battle, you level up and get new equipment for your avatar that helps it win battles, perform quests etc. Normally I hate this sort of thing because it makes my clapped-out old computer fall over, but this site loads quickly. The games are a bit limited, but I quite recommend Wet Dreams (! not what you're thinking) and FlashPiper. As you play and submit scores, your energy is reduced and you have to rest, but it also enables you to level up. PvP is a good way of leveling up, as you don't lose anything by participating - even if you lose a match you gain a small amount of experience points. If you win, you gain a large amount! Yay!
On the down side, it seems to take a while to get to the point where you can play quests - I'm level 3 and it's not allowing me into the quests. This gets a bit frustrating. The avatars are... frankly unattractive - actually, hideous would be a better term - but I've managed to make mine look like the late Kurt Vonnegut, which is kind of gratifying. I'm looking forward to finding out what you get as you progress through the levels, though, and at this point, it costs nothing to play.