The Story of Goldbeard
By
D4RK3 54B3R
Theme: Not Ninja
1st Place
Result: Polished
Returning Participant
Arr! In "The Story of Goldbeard" you play as an orange wearing blonde haired pirate who must stealthily sneak into enemy territory, assassinate the enemy guards, and steal back his treasure. A good help file is present, as are tips at the start of missions. Sounds and graphic effects convey exactly what is happening in game and add to the polish. The game plays much like Airjoe's winning entry from the original GiaD with light and shadow playing important roles, but D4RK3 54B3R adds sound and combat to this formula. Sadly, the game is very short, being just the first chapter; hopefully more chapters will be produced in the near future. Though JP's entry has better replay value, this entry scores very highly in use of theme, perhaps using its theme better than any other past entry - Believe it!
GIAD2010
By
Jp
Theme: Base
2nd Place
Result: Polished
Returning Participant, Fifth Event
Jp's entry this year is a chess variant where the purpose is to invade your opponent's side of the board with your pieces, killing whatever you need to, including the king. It's a very simple concept and the code is equally simple: there's only one short code file of about 700 lines, and no libraries. The result is a refreshing no holds barred take on chess that actually makes chess fun. The game is polished with no runtime errors or bugs that I could find. A help file is included, and is straight forward and easy to understand. I'm very impressed by how much Jp could do with so little. That being said, there are two additions I feel need to be made before the game is ready for extended use. First, some minimal sounds would be nice. Second, a piece movement animation; our play testers found it hard to keep track of what moved, and we found ourselves continually asking "which piece did you just move?". If use of theme were not factored into scoring this game would easily be first.
Ninja Team
By
F0lak
Theme: Group
2nd Place
Result: Polished
"Ninja Team" is a cooperative game for 2 to 4 players, or 1 player if your bored and don't mind the diminished gameplay. Each player selects one of four ninjas to play as, each with different abilities. The team must make use of each ninja in order to complete its infiltration mission. The game has a nice balance that has to be played to be appreciated. There is a help file present and everything works pretty much as you'd expect it to, with the minor exception of enemy AI which can sometimes rush like a madman towards you. No runtimes or bugs were encountered. Taking into consideration the fact that Jp and F0lak had different themes to work with (so one could have had an advantage over the other) I'm going to consider this a tie for second place. Now go play it.
You are an Object
By
Cbgames
Theme: Not Ninja
Result: Playable
Returning Participant
You are a lab experiment that never really went anywhere. Instead of having useful super powers, you got stuck with the ability to turn into a flower pot. When the power goes out at the facility where you're kept, you see your chance to escape. The gameplay in "You are an Object" is simple: You move left or right through hallways trying to get to the next door, elevator, or vent without being seen by the guards who wander back and forth. If you are in danger of being seen by a guard then you can turn into a pot to escape suspicion, earning points for the Not Ninja theme (or an equal number of points if you're looking at it from the Metamorphosis angle). It has a nice lighting effect which isn't present in my screenshot... my ancient laptop crashed several times before I disabled it. This teeters on the edge between complete and simply playable due to its limited scope and lack of replay value but absence of bugs or any other problems.
BitWars
By
SuperAntx
Theme: ????
Result: Complete
BitWars is a two player game of conquest where players fight for control over nodes on the map. Each node grows in strength over time. At any time you can select a node and then select another node to send "Bits" (small fighters) to attack or strengthen it. The more powerful the starting node, the more bits you can send. If you take over all the nodes on the map, you win. The game functions well without any runtime errors or bugs. A help file is present, though it leaves out info about how to start the game or about how the game has no single player mode. Gameplay is fast - very fast - paced, often too fast to consider possible strategies. Because of the single map there also seems to be an optimal strategy. One of the play testers pointed out how the game could have been made without using custom movement to move the little bits, and this would cut down on lag, making the game much more playable for remote players. SuperAntx didn't include any info about which theme he used, and I don't see any use of theme in this entry. As such the game scores lower than another such game of comparable polish would.
GIAD 10
By
Jeff8500
Theme: Base, nominally
Result: Playable
Returning Participant, Third Event
The otherwise unnamed "GIAD 10" is a shooter where you play as a blue circle defending your "base" (never seen on screen) against hoards of yellow circles (described as "yellow spikey hair ninja clones") that fall from the sky. Your only defense against them is to madly move from one corner of the screen to the other while holding down the shoot button, because there's no way to use tactics or reflexes to kill all of them in time. Every so often the size and speed of the pellets you shoot will change. These changes are called "upgrades", but these upgrade in a cycle. In other words, eventually it'll "upgrade" back to their original form. The custom movement and key-state system is very nice, but the game scores poorly in the areas of scope and theme.
Spy Wars
By
Gamemakingdude
Theme: Not Ninja
Result: Playable
Returning Participant
This is a multiplayer capture the flag type game with a heavy emphasis on stealth. The goal is to sneak into your opponents' base to steal intelligence papers, and then return them to your own base, while setting traps to ensnare enemy spies, so it scores well on use of theme. The game works best with a lot of people, but includes enemy NPCs so things arn't too easy with only two players. No runtime errors were encountered, but a lot of the game refused to work. For instance, none of the play testers could figure out how to return intelligence papers to the base (walking over the mail box did nothing). The game makes use of copyrighted material (such as "Spy vs Spy" icons), and the teams are often hard to understand (the blue and red teams have black and white colored spies). This is playable, but needs a lot of work.
Chat
By
RCC
Theme: ????
Result: Disqualified
RCC sent a very clean looking fully featured chat room as his entry. Though the program looks very well made, there were several problems with the entry. First, it is a chat room, not a game. As this is the "Game in a Day" event, all entries must be games. Second, there are no source files, only the host files. It's a nice program, but not what this event is about, and must be disqualified.
Bear Barbarians
By
Oasiscircle
Theme: Bear
Result: Polished
Returning Participant
I love this game. Those of us who participated on an alternate date had to choose from the themes of "Group" and "Bear", using any meaning of those words. Oasis chose to do a game about actual bears. You see, bears hate singing. The whole game was made in about four hours after I personally challenged Oasis to get something entered this year. The game itself is a nice reprise of last year's winner, "Turtle Towers". A help file is present, and everything works perfectly; no bugs or runtimes were encountered. The lack of time does show, though: there is a lack of variety in enemies, and play control leaves a lot to be desired. Also, the theme doesn't really affect gameplay in any appreciable way; those bears could just have easily been Vikings, Trolls, or Turtles even. That being said, it's a completely new game with good custom graphics and interface work all done in four hours. Nice work. (If you're wondering why this is all the way down here... let's not get into that. There were some irregularities with the entry which disqualified it from competition for placement, but not from the event itself, similar to how my entry is always at the bottom of the list.)
Bear!
By
IainPeregrine
Theme: Bear
Result: Unplayable
Returning Participant, Third Event
Another year, another failure. Even after opting to do a different date (so my time wouldn't be eaten away by answering other peoples' questions) I still can't produce a game in a day. Perhaps it has something to do with having to think up the themes? Perhaps next year I'll have someone think up a theme specifically for me. Also, this game sucks. Press Z to jump, Space to attack, and Alt+F4 to get the hell out of there.
