Moray Game Jam: The Winners

That’s it.  It’s over.  The first ever Moray Game Jam which is, as we may have pointed out, the most northerly game jam yet to take place in the UK, is all over.

They came, they coded, they had pizza. Nine games were created. It was, by general acclaim, awesome. The theme of Ied The World was adhered to by almost every team and there was a huge variety in the styles of games being created.

So who won?

There were two runner-up prizes.  These were picked up by:

Labracadabrador (Daniel Waine, John Gifford, Richard Edwards, Carrie Francis, Ross Stephens) – They Changed Eden

This concept sounded amazing from the very beginning.  The very early prototype looked wonderful. Your job is to protect a planet from a barrage of incoming meteors using a handily positioned satellite.  Spin the satellite around the planet and stop the terrifying space rocks.  Each meteor, or possibly asteroid (it was never properly established which they were) affects the planet upon impact, raising or lowering the temperature, bringing new bacteria and biological diversity or raising the land mass.  This in turn affects the life forms on the planet.  You have to let the beneficial space rocks through, stop the bad ones and give the planet’s inhabitants time to construct a giant rocket an escape the huge mother of all asteroids, which is on a collision course.

This was a great prototype and one which made all of the judges go ‘Ooooh!’. It was created on PC, but the team also managed to port it to Android tablet and mobile over the course of the jam. During the final discussion, the judges felt that the game had grown a little too complex and that the initial, simple concept had been a little buried under additional features. It’s still a damn fine game and one which deserves to see the light of day at some point very soon.

Dyno Games (George Owen, Dino Mijatovic, Martin MacLeod, Dillan Mann, Craig Macdonald) –Dynopocalypse

This concept sounded eerily familiar from the very beginning.  Your job is to use gigantic flaming meteors of death, to rain destruction down upon the poor unsuspecting dinosaur inhabitants of various planets, wiping them from the surface and leaving the world pure, pristine and presumably ripe for takeover by the jumped up monkeys. Designed for touch screens, the player must swipe from the edge of the screen to launch and guide their meteor of doom to impact. But the dinosaurs are quite nippy and run away from the hurtling space boulders. Plus many planets have moons zipping around them in close orbit, causing problems for the would be Vogon destructor. Limited meteors are on offer, so every one must count towards obliterating the scampering scaly swine on the early evolving earth.

This game was pretty much completed by the end of the first 24 hours and the team, cleverly spent the rest of the time play testing, polishing and building levels. It’s simple, intuitive and fun. There’s just enough gravity in the game to allow players to put a little spin on their burning fragments of cosmic matter and angle them in to take the lumbering behemoths by surprise. It was simple, fun and intuitive. One of the most popular games in the jam and showed the value of a simple concept, cleverly executed.

However, the overall winner was:

Powerpunch Studios (Mark Thompson, Elliot Morris, Tasha Singh, Stuart Tait, Carl Paker) – Vaccine

A node-based strategy game in which two players compete as virus and vaccine.  The game takes place on a hexagonal grid and players use joypads to move between and capture the nodes. Each node will turn to that player’s colour and start sending pulses across the grid.  If the pulses hit a scoring node.  You earn points.  At the end of 60 seconds, the player with the most points wins.

The Powerpunch team had a completed game, that was more or less ready for commercial release by the end of the jam. It was very simple to pick up and play, but offered a real challenge when competing against another player. The art style was simple and very effective and it was.. well, fun.

Powerpunch will now talk to the team at Hunted Cow about how they might continue to work on the game and head for a commercial release.

We’ll have photos of the awards ceremony and a round up of all of the games in a following post. In the meantime, huge congratulations to Powerpunch, Dyno Games and Labracadabrador. We salute you all.