Nullarbor 2008 Prizes

It was a great pleasure last night to hand out the prizes to this year’s Nullarbor winners. The standard of the games this year was outstanding and it is a credit to everyone involved that due to the incredibly high quality, we had the closest results ever.

This year we also decided to have a judges prize, which we awarded to Jack Casey (aka Beetlefeet) for his outstanding game “LadyBug” (video, game). I’m sure his prize — a copy of Maya Unlimited from Autodesk — will be very helpful in crafting next year’s entry!

The music prize was also very close, with fewer entries but all of them very nigh quality. Congratulations and $250 narrowly went to Simon Whitber (Nxus7) for his winning entry, beating out the competition by just 1 point. The final results were:

As I mentioned, the people’s choice voting was the closest it has ever been, with only 3 points (potentially just one vote) separating the top 3 games.

Nullarbor Game Prize Results
Position	Screenshot	Title/Developer	Points	Links
1		Buttons’ Grand Adventures ECU ML Red Team ‘08	43	Game Video
2		The War of Art AH,MD,SM	42	Game Video
3		Morning Star Peter Alexander	40	Game Video
4		Ladybug Beetlefeet	38	Game Video
5		Thrust Harder Kransky Bros	24	Game
6		The Things NoTime	20	Game Video
7		Super Jesus Twelve Productions	19	Game Video
8		Space Pirates First Empire	19	Game Video
9		Retrovector Brad Power	18	Game
10		Column Breaker OneTwentyThree	11	Video

Semi-Permanent

Just finished my presentation at Semi-Permanent 08 in Perth and wanted to make sure the link to Rod’s game is up here in case people want to play it.  I’ll post my presentation tomorrow but in the meantime:

• Rod Humble’s “The Marriage”

The Art of Independence – Presentation and Notes

Here are the slides (and my personal notes) from my Free Play keynote lecture. Being the keynote, the subject for my talk was pretty simple and to the point: “The paramount importance of independent games, and how they are crucial to games development as an art form.”

It should have been easy, right? Well, consider this: how do you tell the assembled artists and indie game developers making these games that what they are doing is art and important without it being condescending or obvious?

In the end I just dove in, added some stuff about founding Interzone (which is one big indie studio) and then threw in some extra business stuff to round things off. I went this way because most independent developers struggle with the money and project management far more than the actual code.

If you click here or on the link above you can check it out. If you turn off the pics it’s actually reasonably quick to load and fits everything on the page pretty neatly.