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.

 

Cage Match Update

Ablach Blackrat has announced the start of this week’s cage match (#157).

This match has 3 participating games, the winners of the recent YoYo Games Ancient Civilization competition.
1. Ancient Ants Adventure by RedSystem
2. Caveman Craig by RhysAndrews
3. Tut’s Test by KCLC

The rules are as follows:

• On the Saturday of each week two games in the Creations Forum will go head to head in a contest to be voted on by GMC users.
• On Saturday morning, the winner will be chosen from the tallied votes and will go onto the next Cage Match.
• The Creator of the game that didn’t win will pick the next game to compete.
• This is important: I will contact both contestants at the beginning of the match and ask that both submit a replacement game to me by PM by the Thursday of the same week that they are in the Cage Match. This is to ensure that the Matches continue without interruption. If I do not receive PM’s then I will choose the next game. Please no one else submit game suggestions to me.
• If a game wins four rounds it will be retired to the Hall of Fame and the two games recommended for replacement by the contestants will be entered into the next Cage Match.
• The games selected to be replacements can be any game posted within the last 4 months of the end of the voting period.
• The games chosen by the participants can be either posted in the GMC or at Yoyo Games.
• A contestant may not choose another one of their own games to take their place.
• Any type of valid Game Maker creation may be chosen, not just games.
• In the event of lack of nomination or a game making into the hall of fame, the cage match moderator may choose a game beyond the two month deadline.
• Under no circumstances may anyone PM the contestants to ask if their game be nominated. This will earn an immediate ban of that game from participating in the Cage Match. Posting in the actual Cage Match topic to ask the same thing will received an immediate warn.
• When replying to this topic: do not post just to say who you voted for.

Ablach Blackrat also posted to let users know that after the first month or so, the Cage Matches will return to normal with 2 games per match and entrant game selections.

GMTech Update

GMTech sent out an e-mail update to its subscribers today to give updates on Issue 13 of the popular Game Maker magazine. The next issue is due to be released shortly and will include articles on a variety of topics such as casual game development, website design, comics and interviews.

The team has also announced that they will be doing a special on YoYo Games in issue 14 which will include an exclusive interview with a YYG spokesperson. GMTech is encouraging users to submit questions that they would like answered on their forum.

Lastly, the GMTech website has had some recent updates and now features a blue design.

Forum & Glog Changes

According to YoYoJim (an administator on the GMC forums), a forum upgrade was put in place this morning upgrading it to version 2.3.5 from 2.3.4. This upgrade caused a short down time for the forums earlier today, but everything appears to be in working order now.

On a separate note, Mark Overmars has announced that his personal ‘glog’ at yoyogames.com will now be merged with the more official Yoyo Games glog used to provide important announcements to users. This does not seem necessary, although maintaining two seldom used blogs could also be seen as unecessary. At the moment the YYG team is working on merging both the posts and user database.

That’s all for now, remember to keep posting. Winner of the contribution prize will be announced on the 30th of June GMT-

Firefox 3 & InstantPlay

For those of you who use Firefox, you may be aware that Mozilla just held a world-record-breaking 24 hour download marathon for the newly released Firefox 3. This means about 7 million people are now running Firefox 3, many of which are trying to use YoYo Game’s InstantPlay system.

The problem is, InstantPlay is not yet compatible with Firefox 3, and this of course is causing some concern amongst users and game authors. What is even more concerning is the fact that Firefox 3 users can neither InstantPlay nor Download a single game from the YoYo Games website.

What we find strange is the fact that the plug-in itself appears to be fully compatible with Firefox 3. When you use additional Firefox add-ons to override compatibility of the plug-in it appears to run flawlessly. The only problem holding back the plug-in seems to be the fact it hasn’t been approved for secure updates. New Firefox extensions now require either an SSL secure certificate or an approval from the Mozilla team. Apparrently the extension has neither.

According to a new glog post, Sandy Duncan has announced that they are working on the problem and in fact they had requested a change (did not specify what) to Firefox earlier on in the beta to help ensure compatibility in the final version. Apparrently this change was not made, but as far as we can tell from our view-point, this should not have prevented the YoYo Games team from adding the required security measures to make the add-on compatible.

GMac/Linux Nearing Beta

Sandy Duncan has informed us that he saw a demo of the Mac version of Game Maker yesterday. Mark Overmars is currently in the process of deciding whether it is beta-worthy, and if so when the beta release date will be.

One thing Sandy does note is that Leopard (OS X 10.5) may be required to run the software when it is released as a beta. This could pose a problem for a lot of Mac users since it’s similar to saying ‘only works on Vista’ for PCs.

For the first time we know of, Sandy also gave a short statement of the possibility of a native Linux version of Game Maker coming out sometime this year. This is likely dependent on how well the Mac version of Game Maker performs, and is unlikely to have a release ready before the Mac version is public.