Kongregate, YoYo Games’ big brother?

For many of the GM community, it has been a long-held belief that YoYo Games was pioneering something new, an opportunity for amateur game developers to get noticed and show case their games to a wide audience and community in true web 2.0 style.

It turns out in fact that a site called ‘Kongregate’ has been offering a very similar service since 2006. Although Kongregate does not allow submissions of Game Maker created games, the site itself is feature-packed and in many ways makes YYG look like the kid who hasn’t grown up yet.

Until one or the other starts running both types of games (flash and executables), I don’t forsee any major competitive battle-out between the two companies. But what I do see is an opportunity for the YoYo Games staff to take a look at what Kongregate is doing and ‘borrow’ some ideas to improve their current website.

Just to name a few of the features which I think are interesting
– The ability for users to embed/run their games from independent websites
– An integrated API to sync game high-scores with the website
– Ability for developers to make 50% on in-game ad revenue
– In game live chat between players

Thoughts?

Compeition 03 – The results are in!

YoYo Games announced the winners of the recent co-operation competition today.

Congratulations to Erik Leppen, who was awarded first place for his game ‘ByteAlity Tower Defense‘.
As a first place winner, Erik will receive a well deserved $1000 from YoYo Games.

Earning a genorous $500, Rotten_tater was awarded second place for the game ‘Visit 2‘.

Last but certainly not least, YoMamasMama took third place and earned himself a modest $250 for the game ‘Jumper Three’.

The YoYo Games team were also nice enough to include a list of runner-ups (in no particular order):

Techno-drone: Alliance – A unique challenge, an excellent update to the series.
Kuroshiro – A really interesting puzzle platformer, excellent use of the theme.
Eggs with Legs – Nice graphical style, great gameplay, but no sound.
Karoshi factory – Co-op theme expertly incorporated to spice up this epic series.
Lost snowmen – Probably the best looking game in the competition.
Red n Blue – Good looking, well planned platformer – too short!
Agalag – A great concept makes this one of the most original games on YYG.
The Eyeballs – Well rounded platformer, with a good story.
Wootman – Great game in 2-player, although furiously hard – awesome retro graphics.
A Square Shaped Adventure – Good polish, interesting co-op dynamic.
Timewave – An excellent little game, brilliant use of the theme.

Co-op Comp Results to be Revealed

Sandy Duncan of YoYo Games revealed yesterday that the results of the third YoYo Games competition would be revealed in the next 48 hours. Before 5pm BST on Thursday, to be precise.

 

The results to this competition have been anticipated greatly and it’s good to hear that YoYo Games will have finally come up with a winner by tomorrow, after keeping many people waiting for over a month. Sandy said that the winners for this competition were harder to choose than ever before, because of the good range of good, quality games; he said that there were three times as many games on the shortlist than in previous competitions. Both previous competition winners have created a game for the contest and it appears that it will be one of the tightest and most unpredictable results so far. It will certainly be interesting.

 

Competition 4 (Save the Planet) Underway

As per the announcement by YoYoJim on the GMC, The Yoyo Games 4th game making competition has officially begun.  The theme this time around is green – and not just because of the $1000 US prize still being offered. The “Save the Planet” theme capitalizes on the controversy regarding global climate change, acid rain, overcrowding or any other problem that has the capacity to wipe out global civilization as we know it.

Tree-haters are welcome, as any viewpoint regarding this controversy is encouraged.  “Feel free to make a game where the world must be saved from a bunch of crack-pot environmentalists,” explains the YYG team.

The same old competition rules apply. So get cracking, creators!  The competition ends January 4, 2009.

Glog – Competition 03, Softwrap?

The previously inactive and almost dead official Glog has suddenly become the cool place to hang-out with updates and new posts nearly every week. Just three days ago Mark Overmars posted an article explaining methods of using Cyrillic characters and Hebrew, Arabic, Japanese, and Chinese fonts and symbols.

Today however, the Glog post announces the completion of the third YoYo Games competition. The competition, with a theme of ‘co-operation’ had more submissions than any of the previous two competitions held by the company. It’s now up to the site’s users to play and evaluate the 285 participating games to help determine the winner.

The announcement for Competition 04 is expected shortly although it is ot clear when, nor is it clear when the judging for the current competition will be finished.

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As something completely separate to the Glog, we are conducting a small survey to evaluate the Softwrap registration system used in Game Maker and to gauge whether users are satisfied or dissatisfied with the system. Please discuss and indicate if your experience was positive or negative and if negative were you able to receive technical support or did you have to resort to other methods for registering your software.

ANYone who links to ANY site containing information about obtaining Game Maker ‘Pro’ without using the official Softwrap registration system will be banned from making future comments on GMNews.

Glog again? – GMSchool Downhill

For a third time in three days, the YoYo Games glog has been updated with yet another post.

It reads,

The deadline for the third YoYo Games competition is quickly approaching. You have only four more days to submit your entries. We hope that we will see a number of interesting additional submissions. Checkout the Competition page for details. Please realize that the deadline is strict. Last time we extended the deadline because of the problems caused by the server move, but that is not the plan this time.

So there you have it, your last chance to submit a game so don’t miss out. For everyone else, click here for a list of participating games for you to check out and rate.

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In other news, GMSchool, a community forum to help Game Maker users is starting to take a turn for the worse. The previously popular message board, is becoming increasingly bare with some forums having no posts in months. Due to the lack of recent support, the owner of the forum is unable to continue funding the community and therefore will not be able to make the required annual payments for forum licensing and hosting costs to maintain the site.

As a result, the community is going to be moved back to Invision Free (a free forum hosting service) where ShadePlay23, the owner of the board, hopes the forum will gain some attention and pick-up it’s popularity once again.

Cage Matches Tomorrow

Ablach Blackrat announced a few days ago that the popular Cage Match competition at the GMC would be returning tomorrow.

The basic idea for the Cage Match is that two nominated games are selected for discussion and voting by the community to start out. The game which wins that round will then be facing off a new game the following week. The longer a particular game can stay in the Cage Match, the better the game is supposed to be.