October Three Thing Game Winners

These folks are the true survivors.

[Cross posted from www.threethinggame.com/]

Well, we lost a few on the way. The effects of fatigue and the lure of Halloween parties meant that some of our teams didn’t make it to the finish line. However, a good time was had by all and I’ve never seen so much pizza eaten by so many so quickly. The pizza company had to send two cars to deliver all 40. And it all got eaten…

This morning at 7:30 Simon and I went around with a camera and got presentations from all the teams of their games. The videos will be up tomorrow so you can see for yourself how just how good they are. We had some especially impressive solutions from First Year teams who, with only five or so weeks of C# under their belt, produced some highly playable results. Then, at 9:00 sharp the three judges, Warren, Neil and Simon watched the top ten teams and picked the winners. Which was so difficult we had to award two second prizes.

Judges and videos

You’d think they’d look pleased with prizes of this quality….

This is the team that won the award for best interpretation of their Three Things.  “Tactical Nuclear Penguins”, made up of Josh Crowther, Alex Beamer and Dan Burns had to make something from “Funky, Robot, goes underground”. And make something they did. An underground exploring robot agent working down through caverns to fight the devil no less. Hooked up with great dance move beat matching action and coming to Windows Phone Marketplace near you soon.

The first Second Place team, if you see what I mean, “The Double A's”. Anthony Quinn and Aaron Ridge produced a fast moving, pretty much market ready for Windows Phone take on “Extreme Hamster in a Graveyard”. Great work, even if they couldn’t keep their eyes open at the end.

This is the second, Second Placed, team. “I chose this weekend over Battlefield 3” , aka Lindsay Cox, Devon Hansen, David Hart and Michael Bumby. Their game based on “Gun-toting, Volcano, in Space” combined Bejewelled style action with a sideways blast-em-up which had the player matching threes to arm Space Marines attacking the Volcano.  Lots of guns, and lots of toting.  Great work guys. And don’t worry, we’ll have Lego prizes for all of you once we’ve been down to ToysRUs.

The Winners, with their prizes.

The Winners were praised by the judges for producing a game for Windows Phone that was good enough to sell right now, with delightful graphics, a well honed mechanic and good adherence to the theme. And you could slice the moon in half. These guys are making a bit of a habit of winning,  having nabbed the prizes in the last competition too. “The Infamous Two Sirs”, Christophe Lionet and Robert Marshall produced a game based on “Tomb, Ninja, Travelodge” that looks excellent and plays great. Well done guys.

The next Three Thing Game will be on the weekend of 17th and 18th March 2012. Start planning now.

Three Thing Game Starts

This morning I was off up to ToysRUs first thing for the prizes. Including a speedboat….

Find out more about how things are going over at the competition site.

http://www.threethinggame.com/

Whatever Happened to Flickr

This is a bit of cautionary tale I guess. I’ve been using Flickr for many years as a host for my pictures. I found the service so good that I’ve even been paying for it. Until now. Suddenly uploads are going like treacle, the web editing doesn’t work properly and other photo sharing sites are powering ahead with innovations that make Flickr look pretty long in the tooth. Snag is, I’ve got thousands of pictures up there, many of which are linked through to my blog – like the one above of Scarborough harbour.

So, do I stick with Flickr, and hope that their parent, Yahoo, decides that it is worth investing in, or do I jump ship to another company which might go the same way in five years? The cloud is a great place to put stuff, but I think we need to remember that not all clouds stay the same forever.

Windows Phone Blue Book Available

The Windows Phone Blue Book Mango Version is now available. This is for Version 7.5 (Mango) of the phone and 7.1 of the tools.

You can download it from here.

The file is quite big, around 130M. This is because you don't just get the book, you also get a complete course including sample code, Powerpoint decks and labs.

Important: When you unzip the files there are some quite long file paths in the sample code. This is because a Windows Phone project can have quite a few subfolders beneath it. You can avoid this problem by unzipping to somewhere quite high up the directory hierarchy on your disk, perhaps c:\WP7 for example.

Three Thing Game XNA Content

You can find details of the XNA session that I gave today for Three Thing Game here:

www.threethinggame.com