It's been a long, long time in coming, but I'm happy to announce that we finally have the code results in. More to say on that front, but first let's announce the winners:
Winning the grand prize is Lurking Patrol Comrades, an impressive MMORPG with a vast world, plenty of characters to speak to, both a melee and a magic based battle system, and a polished user interface. The project has the same client as The Mana World but implements its own server. It's an interesting project worth checking out, and it's lived on under a new name, Source of Tales.
Congratulations, and please do keep up development; we'd love to see more!
Coming in as the HTML5 Grand Prize is Big Island. Big island lives up to what the name promises… it's a huge, beautiful environment. And it does some interesting things: by day, you have to explore the island to get a sense of where various features are, hire guards or upgrade your weapons or health. By night, zombies come in and try to kill the villagers, and it's up to you to save them. There's a somewhat meditative aspect of the game because inevitably you simply won't be able to save everyone: the task before you is just too large. But you can try to do as good as you can for as long as you can.
In addition to being an interesting game, Big Island is an excellent technical achievement that shows off the powerful future of HTML5 gaming. We hope that Big Island is an indication of a beautiful future ahead for free software in gaming on the web!
Congratulations!
Next up for the secondary individual prize we have Castle Defense. If I had my way, Castle Defense would be a mandatory install in elementary school computer labs everywhere: it's an educational game that's not only fun, it's extremely hard to put down. You are facing off against an army of skeletons invading your castle, and the only way to beat them back is to instruct your archers to fire. The archers have an odd habit of only listening to firing orders that correspond to solved math problems though! At certain points in the game skeletons come in from multiple paths and angles, and you have to combine your math skills with timing, planning, and quick thinking. Definitely a load of fun (and a cool HTML5 entry to boot!) and worth trying. You might find that you have a hard time putting it down!
Congratulations!
Last but not least is our secondary prize for teams. Laurelia's Polymorphable Citizens comes in as an impressive single-player RPG. The game makes use of a modified version of the FLARE engine (if you haven't seen FLARE, well you should, because it's an incredibly impressive project… really great if you like dungeon crawlers). The game doesn't play like FLARE though; for one thing, instead of being an isometric game like FLARE, it has all the Liberated Pixel Cup look to it. And it works great! The game has a good story and some neat features. And as the title suggests, the game makes interesting use of a lot of transformation: in order to succeed in your task, you have to switch between the powers of various creatures!
It's an interesting game, and has a good sense of story and adventure, and cool to see the FLARE engine being put to different use. Check it out!
Congratulations!
I'm excited that we've finally been able to announce the winners of this contest. We had a huge turnout, and we had a huge amount of entries, and a huge amount of quality. In an ideal universe, we would be handing out many, many more rewards. There were so many impressive entries!
If you're interested in seeing more reviews, I highly recommend reading Nushio's blogposts on Liberated Pixel Cup… he reviewed every game that was written. (I avoided reading any of his posts until judging was in, but now that that's done I did some reading through and Nushio did a very thorough job… it's too bad he couldn't have been a judge, but he was also a participant in the contest and was part of writing one of many extremely excellent games that unfortunately did not win, called Unsealed: Whispers of Wisdom.) There's a lot of gems that came in through this contest and the above link is an excellent guide for looking through them.
Of course, there's also the embarrassing fact that the contest took way, way longer to judge than we anticipated. I've mentioned this somewhat when art judging was wrapping up, and it took even longer for this code wrapup. As with the art, we were overwhelmed with submissions. The code judging took even longer, and I feel bad about this. Between the length of time to play each game, many more games than we anticipated, personal issues in the lives of some key organizers, and the complexity of building so many games, doing this judging was a lot harder than we expected. However, I am still proud of Liberated Pixel Cup. I think it's been a great achievement for many, many people. I'll be writing up a summary post explaining some behind the scenes (including what happened with judging) shortly.
Despite the judging delay, one other sign of success is how excited many of the participants of this year's Liberated Pixel Cup have been to find out if there would be another one. The answer is simply: we aren't sure, but we are certainly interested in it. We think that aside from the judging delays, many of the decisions made in Liberated Pixel Cup were very successful, and we'd like to repeat them. There's a lot of discussion still: will we use the same style? Would it be this year or next? And we will definitely want to update the way judging is done (we have some ideas on this). If you're interested in such things, you should perhaps join us in #liberatedpixelcup on irc.freenode.net and join the conversation.
Congrats to everyone who participated! You rock!
Hiya all,
Well there's no doubt that this blogpost is well past due, but in case you're wondering, yes, we're very near wrapping up judging. In fact: we expect to have judging wrapped up next week.
However, there's a problem: some games are really hard to build. Yours might be among them! Please visit this thread and help us build your game if it's a difficult one to build. If your game is on that list you have one week to help us build it.
Thanks! Good luck all... and sorry for the delays! We look forward to announcing the winners soon.
Hello all! It's been a long time in coming (longer than it should have been!) but the art judging is in. We're floored by the quality (and quantity!) of submissions, and choosing winners wasn't easy for our judges. There's a bit we'd like to say on that below, but that said, we know what you're all waiting for, which is to hear the results! So let's get straight to that first, shall we?
At 89.6 points, the grand prize of $1500 USD goes to Daniel Eddeland for his entry "Farming tilesets, magic animations, and UI elements"!
This is a wonderful set, agreed upon by judges as providing a lot of cool things, especially in the farming set and magic elements and how these extended the range of things possible. Congratulations, Daniel!
The next winner in the "individual entry" prize of $500 USD (of which there are two slots), at 88.8 points, is Casper Nilsson's entry (simply labeled "LPC C. Nilsson"). Despite the humble name, there is a lot of cool stuff here, including an asian theme, day and night cycle tiles, a harbor set, a victorian house, a few animals, and even quite a bit more! Congratulations, Casper!
The next winner is for the second "individual entry" slot for $500 USD. At 84.6 points, congratulations to Johannes Sjölund for the entry "Character animations, clothes, armor, weapons, skeleton enemy, combat dummy"! Once again we have here an entry with plenty of wonderful variety. This set adds quite a few new character designs which can be dropped in and used directly in a game, as well as several new types of animations, and even (as the title suggests), a combat dummy! Congratulations Johannes!
And now for a bit of commentary on the contest and judging.
First of all, it wasn't easy to pick winners! We had no idea just how many high quality entries we would be getting. It has been wonderful to see that the dream that artists can collaborate on a shared set of resources could come true, and that so many people met the call!
And also, a note on scoring: the approach we took is a bit different than what you might see for example in many schools. We set "average" scores to be at about 50... so keep that in mind! Even many of the entries that appear to be lower in scores are actually really high quality entries... most of the entries submitted to LPC were well above what we expected!
We'd also like to speak to the time taken to deliver judging. We know many of you would have liked to see judging results sooner; as would we! Unfortunately there were several serious delays; first of all, there were some major disruptions to Bart and I's lives on a personal level that slowed things from getting off the ground. Second, the sheer number of entries we got (and the quality of entries too!) was much, much higher than we anticipated. This was also harder on our judges; several of them had thought they had committed to a much lighter set of things to judge, so resolving this took some time.
And on that note, code winners have yet to be announced still! We are hoping that in approximately one month we will have these announced, but can't say for sure yet. Stay tuned!
Congratulations again to the winners, and thank you all who participated!
All of the art results are in, and we'll be counting them and announcing the winners of the art contest on the 28th of this month. :)
Getting a group of volunteer judges to go through a hundred entries is like herding cats. As such, I'm not going to be estimating a finishing date any longer, as at this point my guess is as good as anyone else's. Our progress is as follows:
Art judging is 75% done. The 4th judge out of 4 believes he will have the art entries judged by the end of next week. Art results will be posted when they are judged.
Code judging is 15% done.
We apologize for the delay; this has turned out to be a lot more complicated than we had originally thought.