LOTECHComp Results

FIRST PRIZE: "Kingdom Without End" by Shannon Cochran

SECOND PRIZE: "A Dark And Stormy Entry" by Lord Lulwer-Bytton

THIRD PRIZE: "Flotsam" by Jamie Murray

There were six entries in all, and not a stinker amongst them, which made judging extremely difficult, for me anyway. Huge thanks to Adam and Jon for providing their valuable insights.

I'll try not to ramble too much about the contest here - I feel like a proud father. A couple of things worth noting though: both the first and third place games were the first works of IF ever written by each of their respective authors! I'm afraid I'm going to take this fact as more or less confirming all of the heretofore mere prejudices that led me to start up the contest in the first place. Design an engine that takes the sting out of the tail of programming, and the people will come. And they will write games that will rock your world, in spite of the allegedly fearsome technical limitations that such engines place on the aspiring author.

Both "Flotsam" and "Kingdom Without End" were built using Jon Ingold's excellent menu-based CYOA program "Adventure Book." You'll need Jon's "Textrun" interpreter to play these games - this can be found over in the links section of my site, listed under Jon's name. Jon deserves a special round of applause for his continuing efforts to polish and upgrade this program as the contest progressed. The other four entries are in ZCode (Inform) and HTML TADS - if you don't have interpreters for these languages installed on your PC yet, shame on you!

All of the games entered for the contest can be downloaded from

http://www.suite101.com/files/topics/474...

If you're a Mac user, you can get TADS versions of KINGDOM and FLOATSAM at

http://gummiwisdom.com/if/

(Thanks to Randall M! Gee for generously taking the time to port these games.)

The games are packaged in a small .zip file, along with text files contaning short reviews of each game by the wise and worthy judges. All...I repeat, ALL...of them are worth toying with - none takes more than a half hour in total to play if you're clever, and there are plenty of good jokes and neat puzzles to keep all of them well clear of turkey status.

This contest will be run again next year, so beat the rush and start brooding on your entries now! Thanks again to everyone who participated - until next time, then, enjoy the games!

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