Winner of Code a game competition - 8-bit Wars - Jan 25th to Mar 31st 2019

[Qube]

We have our winners

Excellent entries this time around and many really great games.

The top three winners are :

		1st place winner :   Title : Genus Prime   Author : Derron   Link : https://www.syntaxbomb.com/index.php/topic,5420.0.html   Vote points : 1st = 6 | 2nd = 1 | 3rd = 1 ( Total = 675 )
		2nd place winner :   Title : Viva Mortis   Author : iWasAdam   Link : https://www.syntaxbomb.com/index.php/topic,5206.msg24449.html#msg24449   Vote points : 1st = 1 | 2nd = 5 | 3rd = 2 ( Total = 400 )
		3rd place winner :   Title : Jack Deadly   Author : therevills   Link : https://www.syntaxbomb.com/index.php/topic,5248.msg24418.html#msg24418   Vote points : 1st = 2 | 2nd = 2 | 3rd = 3 ( Total = 375 )

How was the scoring done :

1st place awarded 100 points
2nd place awarded 50 points
3rd place awarded 25 points

Complete voting breakdown :






Winners, PM me your PayPal address and I'll magic over your winnings

Comments about the games ( if sent ) :

Morpheus :

1st - Tiny Tales, great use of the c64 colour palette. Really enjoyed playing this one. 
2nd - Viva Mortis, looked like a Spectrum game, a bit hard but enjoyed the experience. 
3rd - Damnation Alley - Who doesn't like a bit of Spy Hunter, well a sequel! 

Also enjoyed but was tough to pick the best games:

* ZX Collection Volume #1, liked all the games but would have preferred to have one game, but bigger.
* Genus Prime, Nice use of the c64 colours, but used the wrong resolution for a c64 coloured game. Also think any 8 bit retro machine wouldn't have been able to shift that many pixels around at once.
* Simple, great puzzle idea but way too hard. Would have preferred some simple levels to break the player in.
* Fireball Dragon, Good use of the 64 colours, certainly a promising game.


Imerion :

1. Genus Prime
This game felt very genuine in it's retro representation while having a modern concept that I don't think was ever realized in an actual retro game. I felt that was a perfect approach to this competition. The fast-paced strategy gameplay was fun, there were some excellent pieces of art, a nice user interface and an overall polished appearance.

2. Viva Mortis
This game had a fantastic presentation filled with awesome little details. Great atmosphere, gameplay was fun and smooth and there were some nice music and sound effects. Well thought-out design and a fitting theme was another highlight.

3. ZX Collection Volume #1
Besides the impressive feat of creating a game collection for a limited time competition, this impressed me with how well made each game was. Rescue Rob and Galaxy Defender especially resonated with me and was really fun to play. Nice retro aesthetics with a modern touch, well-tuned gameplay and a very catchy title tune made me like the entire package.


3DzForMe :

1: Genus Prime  -  Gameplay is awesome - keeps you coming back for more, to the point this game inspired someone else to evolve it already!

2: Damnation Alley: Attention to detail with the wheels going around says it all, Loved the soundtrack, Invada load icing on the cake

3: Jack Deadley: My daughter loved playing this - I used to appreciate platformers but have got old. - Great style.

I know we're only meant to vote for 3 - I'd prefer to be able to vote for 6 in future - or even ALL entrants if possible in future.


Steve Elliott :

1) Jack Deadly.  Superb platformer with lovely graphics, if difficult and tricky controls - weren't all games of that era?

2) Viva Mortis.  Incredibly authentic Atic Attack/Sabre Wulf whizzy shenanigans with stunning graphics.

3) Genus Prime.  This was a surprise for me.  But the game kinda grabbed me and I wanted to come back to it again and again.


STEVIE G :

1st Gravitus - My kinda game. 
2nd Genus Prime - Nice little time waster.
3rd ZX collection - 4 games in 1 - enough said.
4th Viva Mortis - Clearly alot of effort went into this one just not a big fan of isometric games.
5th Jack Deadly - great graphics - controls were not intuitive and this spoiled the gameplay for me.
6th Damnation Alley - great tune and concept

[Qube]

Really impressed with the entries for this comp. I think it's been a huge leap from all involved and shows the quality of coders we have here.

To comment on the winners :

Genus Prime - Really well done and a very engaging game. I don't see pixels moving across the screen, I see heavily armoured Star Trek Defiant Class ships heading off to kick ass - Superb work in such a short time. I do love a good RTS and even though I was watching pixels move back and forth, I've never willed a pixel to move so fast in my life - Great game, love the overall concept and implementation - As the winner you now have to add skirmish mode. It's the rules!!

Viva Mortis - This game was really hard for me when judging. If I were judging on creative talent and coding skills alone then this would be 1st place by a mile. It's extremely well done, has lots of content and is a blast to play. Personally for me the only reason it missed out on a vote was due to the playability of the other entries. It's a shame I couldn't squeeze this one in as it's one hell of a game and I went back and forth for a long time playing the other entries. It's a great game and to comment from a coders point of view "I'm jealous of your talent"

Jack Deadly - I hate this game and it hates me!. When I move it kills me and then it teases me with small progress and then it kills me again. Do not play this game if you have a tendency to smash objects in front of you. I admired the graphics for a while which are very well done before returning to loathing this game. He he, excellent game and a classic example of requiring ninja retro movement skills. Very well done and hats off to doing it all in such a short space of time.

[Derron]

Thanks for all your votes guys! Thought others would win because they played so great and had this retro look and all.

Do not forget: even if your entry did not win this time, we ALL won by finishing in time, adding a finished little project to our personal game-dev-vita! (sorry if you think this is a platitude but I mean it honest).

As the winner you now have to add skirmish mode. It's the rules!!

It's in already. Just click the button "skirmish game" and there you go.
Seriously: I will try to bring in the other game features as settings and maybe I will upload it then to itch.io or so (am not a user there so little adventure appearing on the horizon).

Remember: the sources are at github.com/GWRon/GenusPrime so I invite interested to bring up new ideas and to improve the game in parts still lacking for now.


bye
Ron

[iWasAdam]

First off let me thank anyone who voted for VivaMortis - I am humbled by you all.

VivaMortis became what it is directly because of suggestions/comments from the people here. So you all contributed something.

"I'm jealous of your talent"

Bloody ell! Thank you Qube 

I'm going to open up a post mortem so people can ask question about how I did stuff (or why), etc

And I want to say I enjoyed all the entries, the time and effort it takes to get something from start to finish is is not an easy task. Even if you didn't finish a project, there is always something to learn from the process.

[Xerra]

Had a feeling Derron's entry was going to knock it out of the park this time and it was pretty much my choice after the second go for the same reasons Qube describes. I did think Gravitus was going to place higher because of the nature of it's quick pick-up-and-play feel about it. Goes to show that people do still like games that require a bit more strategy as well as good reflexes and tight controls.

I did make some comments about each game after I played them so I'll stick them here now that the voting is all done.

Arc of Valtana:

Positives:
Shadowfire music - Love that tune.
Artwork fantastic. Game looks lovely.
Xerra’s bar :-)

Negatives:
Scrolling seemed very glitchy. Maybe just me running parallels on old Mac?
Boss fights immediate end. No time to get coins - you just get forced out of room.
Controls seemed a bit unintuitive but “E” as a default to fire. Took ages to get out of intro screen as I didn’t know the button. Can redefine keys and look at the help text but was annoying on first play.
Pause game possible? I tried esc in the end and there goes my progress - should have a confirmation.

Big Dark Adventure:

Pros:
Liked the hand-drawn pictures - especially the animated ones like the portrait of the girl with rolling eyes. Gave the feel that they were drawn with just a basic brush in an 80’s graphics package.

Cons:
Light on command also went and found a key , unlocked door and prompted me to try the handle? Like it’s doing half the adventure for me.
Pictures appear, scroll up the screen and then are gone. Shouldn’t they be static?
Text overwrites into the edge of the screen so can’t read some of it.
After typing in a command it waits for a keypress - why?
Seem to get thirsty and hungry very quickly.
Room descriptions don’t work for me. Hallway four, etc. Too similar. I went around a few locations but had no real feeling I knew where I was going as I bounced back into the cell a fair bit. When going east I’m told there’s an exit to the East but not to the West where I had just come from. Very illogical.
Some descriptions incomplete. The whooshing sound of strong ……… strong what? Waves, I assume?
Probably within 10 moves or so after starting I was dead. I had no idea what caused this although it was probably thirst or starvation. Or had I fallen into the river rapids?
As I said, I’d like to see if it plays better on a proper machine where maybe it’s laid out how you meant it to be but I struggled to work anything out with the few times I played as far as I could.

Fireball Dungeon:

Pro’s:
Nice artwork style.
Original game.
Has cats in it. Purpose?
Liked the shop implementation.

Con’s:
Needs some music.
Buggy ball movement on 3rd level.
Bit rough around edges with the text requests to enter shop / quit etc.
Waiting around a lot for the ball to hit bricks and release the key.

Genus Prime

Pro’s:
Nice UI style with C64 graphics limitations.
Very good strategy game with upgrade points and progressively larger maps.
Really liked the music - kept humming the title tune all day. Couldn’t get it out of my head !!
Played this game more than any other when judging.
Having a time option is cool but should be able to disable it for when you want to dominate not try and win within a certain time.
Love the way you can watch what happens after you are taken out of the game if you want to.

Con’s:
Middle mouse to scroll would be better than trying to scroll at screen edges.
Control a bit fiddly using the control key to add units or dragging around planets. Too easy to lose focus and have to re-mark the planets you want to send soldiers from. This is a major pain when you want big levels like I was testing on.
A bit too hard - even during tutorial levels. I can’t get off the third level at the moment and I’ve played it a lot.
A select all planets key is badly needed.

Gravitus:

Pros:
Most content in a game with the exception of ZZ collection.
Loved the tracker system which you had if you played on normal mode.
Graphics are really good.
Controls feel spot on - really challenging to boost up then spin the ship to shoot at something under it and then get it back so you can keep from impacting.

Cons:
Music grates after a short time.
Game feels too hard.
Punishing reseting the whole map when player loses a life - especially on the huge maps with 10+ people to rescue.

Jack Deadly:

Pros:
Love the graphic style - very colourful and well animated.
Great music.
How Jack dies is very cool.
Very well presented game. You can see a lot of work has gone into it.

Cons:
Took a while to understand how to play the game. Video playthrough was a revelation, fortunately.
Very hard game. Too hard for me. I just could not get very far into it.
Controls are a nightmare for someone with poor memory like me. Very fiddly - albeit like the original game - but it was so annoying to have to end the game to jump back to the instructions and check how to do a different movement because I’d forgotten it.
Switches are a little hard to spot. Game would be very tricky to progress if I hadn’t seen a video.
Reset back to the start every time you die was too frustrating. Get to a point where you’re struggling to make it through and you have to go right back to the start was too much.

Simple:

Pros:
Interesting idea.
Good attempt to try and put a game together to come in late for the competition.

Cons:
Pretty sure that most of the shapes weren’t possible to drag to their counterparts in the level.
Initially game is pretty confusing without reading game info - no idea what to do at first.

Tiny Tales:

Pros:
Very pretty, small graphics.

Cons:
Bit too slow moving a game for me.
Getting caught up in scenery trying to get around.
Almost no sound at all.
Couldn’t work out how combat worked. Do you just move into bad guys or need a weapon equipped?

Viva Mortis:

Pros:
Excellent use of Ultimate-Style graphics.
48k and 128k Versions.
Lots of exploring - going to need to draw a map.
Technically hugely impressive.
This game was the one I felt the most guilty about leaving outside my top three. It was a toss up between this and ZX Collection but that game got it because I'm a huge Vic 20 fan and the four games were more my style. I never had a Speccy as a kid so the awe of some the the Ultimate games is completely lost on me otherwise I might well have thought differently. Me not including it is not a reflection on how well made this game actually is.

Cons:
Haven’t cracked it yet.
Not being able to kill some of the bad guys that latch onto you was frustrating.

ZX Collection Volume 1:

Pros:
4 games for free.
Obvious a lot of care went into creating these games.
Graphics are simple and effective right down to recreating the colour clash.
Excellent presentation with stuff like the player death effects.
Nice music and sound effects.
Vic 20 Blitz.

Cons:
Shooting game seemed to be a bit easy. Got through several levels with no issues before I moved on to try the other games.
Platform game was frustrating at times with where some of the things you had to pick up you couldn’t reach very easily due to enemy placement. I felt it was harder than it needed to be so couldn’t progress too far in that.



With each of these competitions it seems like we're all pushing ourselves a lot more every time. The standard of entries this competition is staggering, imho. Well done to everyone who had a go and don't feel too bad if you didn't get many points. I was competing against so many great entries this time that I'm staggered I even got the points I did. Thanks to everyone who voted for me as well :-)

Is 11 a new record for number of submissions, by the way? Believe it was 10 previously?

[Derron]

Thanks for your feedback. Will implement:
- Ctrl + A to select all
- middle mouse button for "map dragging"

Further information then in the project thread when it's done.

[therevills]

Great job everyone! Thanks to Qube again for running a great comp and thanks to all that voted!

I've (re)uploaded v1.02 of JD with the simple control scheme.

Reset back to the start every time you die was too frustrating

I was going to add a checkpoint system... but I ran out of steam... maybe in v1.03 

[Steve Elliott]

Fantastic job this comp guys, and thanks to Qube for running another successful  competition.   

[craigd]

Excellent work everyone! Congratufakkinlations to the winners!

Xerra, Thanks for taking the time to comment. That damned level 3 again... does no-one read the names of levels anymore? hahah
I totally agree with your last point and it's the main one that's really hard to get around. I added the Screamer on the first level so the player wasn't waiting around too much.
The purpose of the cats... originally it just doubled the value of the coin collected. Then I decided to give it lives, and a birthday cake was planned for every level.. etc..
For now.... it just has lives, influences the number of coins in chests, and helps to unlock chests a little faster.

[Imerion]

Congrats to the winners and to everyone else involved! And thanks to all involved in arranging, putting up pages or giving feedback!

I'm really happy I got as far as I did with my game since I entered a bit late and had quite a lot of other things to do. It was great fun to participate and I will certainly be ready if there will be more competitions!

[Imerion]

Here are my comments for the voting too, if anyone was curious:

1. Genus Prime
This game felt very genuine in it's retro representation while having a modern concept that I don't think was ever realized in an actual retro game. I felt that was a perfect approach to this competition. The fast-paced strategy gameplay was fun, there were some excellent pieces of art, a nice user interface and an overall polished appearance.

2. Viva Mortis
This game had a fantastic presentation filled with awesome little details. Great atmosphere, gameplay was fun and smooth and there were some nice music and sound effects. Well thought-out design and a fitting theme were other highlights.

3. ZX Collection Volume #1
Besides the impressive feat of creating a game collection for a limited time competition, this impressed me with how well made each game was. Rescue Rob and Galaxy Defender especially resonated with me and was really fun to play. Nice retro aesthetics with a modern touch, well-tuned gameplay and a very catchy title tune made me like the entire package.

[Qube]

I've not forgotten about sending the winners prize money over but it'll be in the first week of May, sorry. Reason is the accountant of a company I do work for is on holiday and not back until the end of the month. Normally they settle accounts in the middle of the month but didn't let me know there would be a delay this month, grr. So sorry for the slight delay in sending the prize funds over but it will happen

[blinkok]

Congratz to the winners.
I must say that every entry was impressive. It's always fun to watch the games evolve
Sorry i didn't get involved with this one.

[Qube]

I must say that every entry was impressive. It's always fun to watch the games evolve

I was very impressed with the shear quality of entries for this comp. Guess I'll have to move up another gear for the next one

well-tuned gameplay and a very catchy title tune made me like the entire package.

Thanks - With the amount of music I wrote for this comp entry I must of spent 50 / 50 between writing music and coding. Not ideal for short comps and I guess I should just download some free music to save time but I enjoy creating cheesy tunes and doing as much as possible myself for the comps

Derron brought up a good point via PM regarding the whole media creation side as in the voting someone who created their own music / graphics / sound effects gets no points or recognition over someone who paid for or used free media. I know the whole point is the actual game itself but I wonder where in general people go "Hmm, you didn't do this side yourself?" is it the sound effects?, music? or as I highly suspect, the graphics?.

Of course if the coding wasn't your own then you wouldn't be allowed in the comps which is why I ban pre-made game templates but yet allow game frameworks that while could be written by experts, you still have to code the game yourself - It's a bit of a dilemma as I do think those that went the extra mile should get *some* recognition, for example iWasAdam had his own sound / music engine going on but it seems unimportant during the voting. Is that fair?

I don't know what the answer is to that as some simply do not have the tools or skills beyond coding and it would be unfair to punish their efforts over someone who does everything themselves. Catch-22 I think which is why the comps have always been to vote on the overall game.

[Qube]

Shooting game seemed to be a bit easy. Got through several levels with no issues before I moved on to try the other games.

Finding the right balance is hard without beta testers. I wasn't quite sure how quick to ramp up the difficulty so went for a slow progression. Perhaps too slow