THE 2006 DONATIONCODER.COM ACCESSIBILITY GAME PROGRAMMING CONTEST RESULTS

Congratulations!

First off, our sincere congratulations to all the winners! Accessibility presents a huge challenge to a game designer, and we had quite an amazing diversity of genres from the finalists, and innovation in so many different areas -- from storyline/writing to game play variety. There is a lot of room for improvement here, and the authors may have discovered that making an accessible game is harder than it sounds, especially for programmers who have never considered the issue of accessibility. But the spirit and creativity behind each of the games was wonderful and the IGDA Game Accessibility SIG will be happy to work with any of the authors who are interested in taking their games to the next level and making them even more accessible. - Michelle Hinn, Chair of the IGDA's Game Accessibility SIG.

About The Prizes

First of all we have to say a huge thank you to the sponsors of this unusual contest. There are many excellent game development websites, and we appreciate that the sponsors of this contest were willing to support the non-traditional focus of this contest and bring a little light to the issue of accessible gaming. Keeping with the spirit of this contest we asked each of the entrants to rate their preferred prizes and we tried extremely hard to find a way to get everyone who entered something they would be happy with - we hope that we've succeeded in that. We've highlighted one game as the top contest winner, and then presented the rest of the collection in no particular order.

Download and Try For Yourself!

On behalf of the authors we invite you to download and play these games. If you enjoy them, please consider making a small donation to the authors to support their continued development! Your donations make a difference.

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	January 2007 22 Zombies Ate My Peoples Ethan Levy's Zombies Ate My Peoples is a switch-game inspired by the Tower Defence flash game. Endless hordes of the dead are rising up from the ground with an unquenchable thirst for brains.  They are coming for your town and will not stop until they’ve eaten all your peoples!  Build towers and upgrade them to protect your peoples from this unspeakable horror. It's one of the most elegant examples of how to make a switch game from an existing game, and in some ways the conversion to a switch game in this case has the possibility of adding to the game in reducing the open-endedness of the original. It's worth noting that Zombies Ate My Peoples is the second game submitted to the contest that was created with the GameMaker system, which we would have contacted about donating prizes for this contest except that their game creation tool is such a great bargain already at $20 that there just didn't seem like a point!  If you want to get your feet wet trying to build a game, GameMaker is worth a look! You use your switch key to advance through your tower positions, and then double press to select and modify.  This same scheme of advance and modify works smoothly throughout that game to great effect.  A further meta level control is available by holding the key for a longer period to trigger some discrete events.  A clever visual feedback bar indicates the current operation.  One of the more satisfying control schemes we saw in the contest. Personal note: As a huge fan of the tower defense game genre - I was ecstatic to see this entry.  I only wish that some more effort had gone into playtesting it and balancing the game dynamics - it seems to me the game is too easy until it hits a certain threshold and then instantly becomes impossibly hard.  With a little more work this game could be incredibly fun - mouser. Download: Here Prizes: Giga Pass to the 2007 Game Developers Conference. Audio proceedings on cd for 2004, 2005, 2006 of the Game Developers Conference. posted by CPMProductions (permalink) (read 10 comments)