Speaking of this, I still need to get Marcus his reward from this. So… Marcus maybe you can send me your Steam ID in a PM or an email?

rbwhitaker's "Frost and Flame: Orbital Defence"!

So whenever he feels up to it he can receive "Sanctum 2" via Steam gifts. He'll need to send me a PM with his current username on Steam along with any other helpful identifiers to help know which user is him. Congratulations!

Sorry for those who wanted to have story in their games but couldn't get around to it. I know Marcus wanted to add a story to his game along with Swatacular's future game needing one from what he said.

Thanks for being so generous with your knowledge and time, not just helping us with anything and everything we ask, but not asking for a single thing in return, the only way to pay you back is to…. well, never mind I couldn't think of anything.

But nevertheless, I all shall always remember you and thank you for the support wherever I am.. So this is the LEAST I can do..

The Generosity Award

Awarded by: Swatacular
Reward: Something cool custom picked by me bought and delivered to your door via Amazon. (approximate $5-$20 value)
For: Being the best most generous person on this website. (regardless of the competition)

Me (just the UI library): https://bitbucket.org/rbwhitaker/starbound-ui/src
Marcus: https://bitbucket.org/TheMazinTar/elacc/src
Swatacular (might actually be private): https://bitbucket.org/Swatacular/future-game-alpha/src

While I felt like there were a lot of contenders for this award early on, and there were a few beginners that I thought were shoo-ins for this (when you're first starting, it's hard not to learn lots of things) by the end of the challenge, there weren't many people left hanging around learning new things.

So I'm giving this award to Marcus!

And no, that's not just a victory by attrition. Marcus was in the chat room asking lots of good questions and participating in programming conversations throughout the challenge. He even attended the UI Crash Course live!

Of course, the real reward for learning lots of stuff during these challenges is that you become a much more competent game developer. Hopefully everybody who participated learned new things. (I know I did.)

Nicely done, Marcus!

The two serious contenders here (the two where people actually made some forum posts and had a download to play) are Marcus's elacc and Swatacular's "Future Game".

I find it interesting how similar these two games are. Top down shooters, with bullets and obstacle detection, etc. I can see they both represent quite a bit of work, learning and growth, and I think both of you two should be proud of what you've made.

At the end of the day, I've decided to give this award to Swatacular!

(Part of my tie breaker here was that Marcus already got a different award from me. I figure since I couldn't decide, I should mix it up a bit.)

Nice work, Swatacular!

Marcus was around a lot throughout the month and posted quite regularly. And we kept bumping into each other in the chat room, and discussing how to implement various aspects of his game. So I know he was working hard on the game for <strike>all</strike> most of the month.

I know some other people had some complications that made it more difficult to get stuff done (sickness, work, etc.). I tried to factor that in, but I still came out feeling like Marcus probably deserves this award the most.

Nicely done, Marcus!

The award ceremony thing would be fun, but I'm just not sure if/when we could really get everybody (or enough people) together to make that useful. I'm open to suggestions, but barring somebody saying something, I'll probably just announce the winners for my awards via forum post in about 12 hours from now.

Only published code will be considered, everyone has to be allowed to view it.
I will consider partial/library source provided that:

1. It was written during and for this competition
2. It Is completely self-contained

However, it will be weighted against full source, hence a full source projects will get extra consideration.

I do have a bit of a follow-up question for you though. I think you've technically answered this already ("must provide full source") but I wonder if I made a particular reusable game component (like my UI framework) open source without making the actual game source available, if that would possibly count. Or would that only count if nobody else actually provided the full source of their game? (Maybe that it would count, just always be beaten by the source of a full, actual game?)

It's OK if the answer is "no". And it's OK if the answer is, "I'll decide that later, if there doesn't appear to be anybody distributing their full source." Or anything else, for that matter. It's your award, and you can do what makes sense to you. I really think encouraging people to share their source is going to be meaningful to people all around. I'm glad we've got an award for this!

The Sexy Code Award

Award: the game "Frozen Cortex"
Awarded by: Emblis

This award goes to the best looking code, in order to be eligible for this you must provide full source.
In order to improve your chances to receive this you should:

• Separate your code into logical classes and functions (bonus if the classes are without unnecessary dependencies and self-contained).
• Pick informative and descriptive variable, class and function names (bonus if you follow a naming convention).
• Comment your code so that understanding it is easier (bonus for being grammatically correct)
• Write the code itself to be clear and easy to understand

Winner will be judged by my me based on best WTFs per minute ratio.

Good idea for an award (both the idea and the reward), Ninjaboi!

Also you definitely still have a chance at winning this, it's unlikely I'll find someone's entry that doesn't qualify in some way so when in doubt just say you qualify.

First time I've ever seen a footnote on this site, by the way. It's nice to see that the CSS works at least reasonably well for it.

Awarded by: Swatacular
Reward: Something cool custom picked by me bought and delivered to your door via Amazon. (approximate $5-$20 value)
For: Being the best Rebel¹ in the competition. (You must declare yourself a Rebel on at least one of the competition rules.)

This will be a very Mysterious award.

Participating in the chatroom in the wee hours of the night may or may not increase your chances of winning.

Sanctum 2 looks like a good game. I almost bought it once a while back, too.

Awarded by: Ninjaboi
Reward: The game "Sanctum 2" gifted to you via Steam ( note: you can only get this award via Steam ).
For: Having either the most compelling in-game story or the more detailed/immersive story in the competition.

First of all the game that's being awarded is pretty cool. It's a FPS + Tower Defense and it does this quite well. If you need more info I'd recommend looking it up and seeing what it is.

As for earning it, this isn't saying have the most drawn-out or longest story. It doesn't even have to be bullet-proof and without plot holes. It simply has to be a convincing story that makes the best case for immersing the player into the game world or compelling them to play. If your game doesn't have tons of text then you don't have to worry as this isn't requiring text-based story-telling either. As long as there's a story and you express it in some way, you qualify for this and might get it depending on how yours fairs against other entries.

If none of the entries has any kind of story though this might default to the "most immersive environment/levels" since that would be the closest thing I can think of that would be a good back-up.

Lastly: If an entry happens to be in a different language other than English it still doesn't disqualify it from earning this. While it might suck that I miss out on some text story-telling, there's many other parts that the game could get this award that are language-agnostic.

Awarded by: RB
Reward: $5 gift card on Steam (or something along those lines… don't know exactly yet.)
For: The best game to come out of the challenge, in the sole opinion of RB.

When the competition is over, I'll pick my personal favorite game. It's hard to say how you'll get this. A mix of creativity, interesting game mechanics, the fun factor, how complete and well rounded the game is. I suspect this will be a hard one to pick because in the past, all of the games are pretty cool.

If a team with multiple people wins, I may raise the value of the prize, but don't plan on it. I may just give it to one person on the team and let them figure out if/how to split it, or I may split it up myself. Or I may just pick a game made by a solo dev to sidestep the problem… :D

Like with the other ones, if you're being a rebel and starting with an existing game, it's in your best interest to make it clear where you're starting at.

While screenshots might be enough to win this award, realistically I'll probably choose one that I can actually get my hands on and play.

Awarded by: RB
Reward: $5 gift card on Steam (or something along those lines… don't know exactly yet.)
For: The person who gets the most done during the competition.

Another one that's hard to judge, other than our chat and forum interactions. Keep in mind that this will be weighted by how much time you have available. So if you've got 31 free vacation days ahead of your for the competition, more will be expected of you than somebody who is working full time and has two kids to take care of.

Bonus points for tackling tough algorithms, even if they kick your butt for a week before you get it sorted out.

If you're being a rebel and continuing with an existing game, please make it easy for us to know what your starting point is. Otherwise I'll have to ignore you for this particular award.

Awarded by: RB
Reward: $10 gift card on Steam (or something along those lines… don't know exactly yet.)
For: The person who learns the most during the competition.

This is not easy to judge, and so I'll probably get it wrong. (Oh well.) It will be determined largely by chat interactions and forum posts (both from your game update thread as well as other forum posts). That's about the only way I can judge this, since I'm not sitting with people as they're going through the learning process.

I seriously doubt that any of these (even the sum total of all of them) will be enough to change how hard people work or anything. It's really just for fun, and just an experiment. (If this doesn't work out, we don't have to do it in Competition #6.)

Keep in mind that these rewards are done completely at the whim of the person offering them. This includes, but isn't limited to:

• They can back out at the last second (including after announcing a winner) with no penalty or ill-effect.
• They could give multiple awards to the same person.
• They can say they felt like nobody really earned the award and give it to nobody.
• They can give it to themselves, if they feel like they deserve it more than anybody else.
• They can eliminate people or groups simply because they felt like it. (Maybe they don't feel like teams with multiple people is fair, even though they forgot to say so when announcing the award. Or maybe it's simply a case of "he doesn't like you.")
• They're allowed to change criteria mid-competition, or even post-competition.
• They're allowed to get it wrong. The award might be given to somebody else that you think deserves it less (or that you know deserves it less). Doesn't matter.

In short, it's completely in the hands of the person giving out the award. That might sound a little extreme, but I think it's the best way for us to have fun with these awards.

Because of the above, don't break your game in an attempt to achieve one (or multiple) of the awards. They're small and could vanish in an instant.

Having said all of that, I think these awards will be fun. A good way to get and give recognition with your friends in the community.

Anybody is free to post their own rewards here. The reward really can be anything you want, and reward people for doing whatever you feel is worth recognition. I wouldn't be too surprised to see several "best/favorite game awards", and that's perfectly fine, but please also consider alternative and unique things that can be recognized to widen the breadth of these awards.

And… please don't feel any pressure to make your own award. If you feel so inclined, please join in. I think it will be fun. But if you don't, that's perfectly fine. (I really think only a couple of people are going to do this. You won't be alone.)

To keep things organized, let's have each award be its own top-level post. This allows people to make comments or have discussion underneath it.