Wrapping it up - Atari Gamer 30th Birthday Programming Competition

[Igor]

 

If you've been following what we've been doing over at Atari Gamer, you'll know that the Atari Lynx 30th Birthday programming competition is now over and results have been announced.

It's been an amazing journey, stressful, challenging, fun, but all worth it.

We'll not say there were winners  of this competition, because every team or person who's entered did an amazing job in the short time that was allocated.

So thank you to everyone who entered!

 

If you haven't had the chance to play these games, head on over here (you can play them online).

 

We'd also like to take this time to ask for feedback - what could be improved, what you liked, what was bad. There's consideration for another programming competition for next year and it would be great to take any lessons learned from this competition and make the next one 1000% better!

 

 

Below are the final points and placements for each of the entries.

 

 

Thanks for making the Lynx come to life again!

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[enthusi]

What a trip that was

Thanks to everyone who contributed and helped organising and sponsoring or featuring this.

In particular Igor of course!

We are super happy to have place 2nd - and even that close \o/

Worthy entries and such a variety. Some of the entries are maybe better suited for a relaxed long winter evening to show their full potential.

I'm really looking forward to this. I hope most of the participants take the energy it may take to bring their games into a finished/published form that can contribute to the Lynx's legacy for the years to come!

We certainly will release Assembloids as a (hopefully) low-cost boxed game.

Some background information about Assembloids is available in this side-thread:

And intra-compo discussions were in some sort of compo-club (is that public? or will be?).

Feel free to ask about our entry and CONGRATULATIONS to everyone involved! What a blast

Cheers,

Martin 'enthusi', Oliver 'v3to' and Kamil 'Jammer'

 

 

[drludos]

What an awesome event it was! Congrats on the winners, and on everyone for the entries.

I'm really thankful to Igor, all the sponsor & judge, and the wonderful Lynx community for such a wonderful time!

 

I've been wanting to jump into Lynx development for years, and this event was the required motivational boost I needed to finally start! I'm very pleased by the great feedback received on Growing Ties, and I'm ultra happy that it managed to rank #3!

 

I'll try to make a cart release of the game too, in 2020 if everything goes well .

 

Regarding the competition itself, here's my feedback:

 

*The Good*

Everything, and I mean it:

- The event was "cool" (friendly community, etc.) but at the same time very well organized and structured. There was sponsors, a scorecard for the jury to use, regular updates, a ROM package for everyone to try the game, the ability for everyone to leave feedback on a AA Club and on Atari Gamer website... This is honestly the most professionally run "programing compo" I've participated in.

- The prize pool was wonderful, and the surprise announcement of it being doubled was a real motivational factor to attract more entries I think :).

- The time period (summer) was great, as we could use the summer vacation time to do real progress on entries.

- Last but not least, the resulting entries are very diverse and interesting to play!

 

*The Bad*

Nothing I can really think of.

 

*Improvement*

Three random ideas:

1) To help the participants who want to expand their games into a full release, maybe have the judges make some detailed feedback / comments on the entries at the end of the compo? It doesn't have to be public or even systematic (to avoid asking too much work on judges). But if some judges had ideas or suggestions on how to make the games better that could be helpful I think, as they have all spent quite some time playing them. I know Igor have already made such comments on AtariGamer, and I thank you for that. But maybe the other judges would have comments to share too?

 

2) I don't know if it could be technically feasible, but wouldn't it be cool to have a "Competition Cart" with all the entries on it? Something similar to what the NESdev compo does for example (they do enforce some technical limitations on the rom sizes though). On the other hand, that could be detrimental to the game quality, as I don't think you could "multi-cart" large games like On Duty, YXNA or Lynx Quest.

 

3) Maybe have a "tool" category alongside the game category. I mean, many people on the community are doing awesome stuffs to help us make Lynx games, from Karri's version of CC65, Karri/Nop90 game template, Nop90 Comlynx code with modified Handy, audio tools like Chipper and Handymusic, Igor's palette generator, and of course all the hardware tools (FlashCart, Rewritable Carts, etc.)! I don't know how exactly, but if a competition could attract and reward such projects in some way that would be cool too.

 

Anyway, you can count on me for the next edition, I'd be very happy to participate!

[Turbo Laser Lynx]

Congratulations and thanks to everyone who participated and to everyone who arranged the competition! ???

[Igor]

Thank you all for the feedback so far. It's great to hear that the competition had such a positive influence. I've been going back and forth between hosting another one or not. I think that decision will be left for next year, at the moment we're moving house and priorities lie elsewhere.

 

I'm still yet to get in touch with all of the competitors about prizes, you've not been forgotten, there's just been not much time to look at the forums or emails in the last week or so. I have some prizes being sent to me in the mail too, so have to wait for them to arrive.

 

Good idea about the suggestion about tooling, it's of course tools that make development easier and without what's out there now we'd be still doing a lot of things manually.

 

Thank you all again for being great competitors!