Assemblee Competition: Results!

By: Derek Yu

On: February 7th, 2010

The results of the Assemblee Competition are in! The winner of Part Two is Ivan Safrin for Bitworld, a really slick action-oriented roguelike that was made in Ivan’s own development framework, Substance (still under-wraps). He made use of a number of people’s work from Part One: Oddball, Oryx, Rynen10k, Blot, Stian Stark, Saros, BigLon. A hearty congrats, dude!

As you can see here, it was a pretty close competition, with a lot of great entries. I noticed quite a few entries made it on to 1up’s 101 Free Games of 2010, among other places. Here are the top ten finishers (with brief and inadequate synopses):

1. Bitworld 72 votes (7.9%) – slick 2d/3d roguelike_
2. Dungeons of Fayte 63 votes (6.9%) – co-op action/RPG_
3. Realm of the Mad God 57 votes (6.2%) – massively multiplayer fantasy_
4. Mr. Kitty’s Quest 51 votes (5.6%) – explorey action adventure game_
5. BirdyWorld 38 votes (4.2%) – Zelda-like where players create the world as they explore_
6. Backworld 33 votes (3.6%) – platformer about painting_
7. Tiny Crawl 33 votes (3.6%) – streamlined room-based RPG
8. s h i n e 32 votes (3.5%) – survival horror
9. The King, the Queen and the Jester 29 votes (3.2%) – first person dungeon crawl
10. Great Dungeon in the Sky 27 votes (3%) – platform game with many characters

Please check out the full list of Assemblee games if you haven’t already. Lots of gems in there.

The winner of Part One was Oryx, for his Lo-Fi Fantasy Tileset, which was used in many a game (including Bitworld). As stated before, all of the art and music for Part One is now available (image-heavy) for you to use in your own (non-commercial) projects. They have been released by their creators under a Creative Commons license.

TIGForums mod and Pokemans-lover extraordinaire Melly also held a Box Art Competition after Part Two, which turned out some more cool stuff.

I loved this competition. I think it definitely proved that a two-part competition can be very successful. Logistically, I’m going to have to do more planning for large volumes of entries. I was really unprepared for all the awesome that was going to come in, and that led to some delays. Thanks to everyone who participated, and congratulations to everyone who finished artwork, music, or a game!

flixel

By: Derek Yu

On: June 5th, 2009

Adam “Atomic” Saltsman’s Flash game API flixel is out. It’s a vastly-improved version of the engine he used to create his popular web games Gravity Hook and FATHOM.

Features:

– High performance 2d Flash rendering
– Lots of retro game physics and effects built-in
– Easy to learn, uses no Flash libraries or Flash classes
– Object-oriented Actionscript 3
– Includes the source code for a complete game
– Forums to help collect tutorials and whatnot

And the online documentation is generated dynamically by Ivan “toastie” Safrin’s Nanodoc system.

Ladies and gentlemen, the world just became a better place to make games exist in.

Play-Make.com

By: Brandon McCartin (BMcC)

On: January 13th, 2009

This post is long overdue. Shame on me!

Ivan “Russia’s Gift to Gaming” Safrin (“toastie” on the forums) has launched a sexy new indie gaming blog, all grey and pink and personal, featuring significant contributions from Adam “Host of Killer Pool Parties” Saltsman (a.k.a. “adamatomic”), called Play-Make.com. It’s more developer-centric than the average blog, with many links to postmortems, exclusive interviews, and other excellent things.

Beyond that, it provides a new perspective on The World of Indie Games, if you’re interested in that sort of thing. (And my guess is you are!) I love how personal it is. There’s even some juicy behind-the-scenes details on the first TIGJam!

While I’m writing this post, I might as well mention that Ivan’s been The Official TIGSource Photographer since Gamma 256. You can find his photos of numerous indie events on his Flickr photostream. (That is, if you really want to get an idea of just how infrequently I bathe!)

I was going to add this to the External Links section, but apparently I already did when I first sat down to write this post!