(UPDATED ON 11/5)

My team's basic plan has been to incorporate as many features as possible from the Is Your Game Juicy? video -- features like screen shakes, wobble effects, and particles -- in the spirit of "There is no such thing as too many particles".

We added in a referee, "to keep things fair". When the ball hits the referee, he drops items. When a player collects five stars, he gets a power up. In addition to the three basic time/speed power-ups, the player can also collect spells which are dropped from the referee. There are two spells -- mist and stun. The spells are cast using Right Shift and Left Shift.

We are writing our game in Ruby, using the Gosu gem. We are going to try to compile to .exe and .app prior to the competition deadline. The final version submitted for the competition is available at:

https://github.com/MattLemmon/StickBall

There are detailed Install Instructions in the Readme, including How to Install Ruby.

A compiled executable for Windows is also available, although it was not complete prior to the competition deadline:

StickBallClone-master.zip

To play, download, unzip, go into the StickBallClone-master folder, and double-click on main.exe. Hope you like it. Here are some screenshots:

I just packaged my game Winter-Pong for you!

It is a slightly incomplete version and I only tested it myself. I would appreciate it enormously if you try it out and tell me if you got it working on your computer, to give me some peace of mind.

Please tell me about any installation problems, bugs, documentation mistakes. I am also interested in hearing how you like the game, if the sound volume is ok and how you like the game balancing.

The page I wanted to upload it to is not taking any more new files and I had to improvise a bit. [snip]

Installation instructions are included, you will need to download Ruby 1.9.3 and possibly the DevKit 4.5.2 also from http://rubyinstaller.org/. More instructions are in the technical questions thread and the readme.txt and install.txt inside the game package.

Edit: Please use the link https://www.dropbox.com/s/g7ykbg55jj4w4vn/winter-pong-0.3.zip from the posting below now!

https://www.dropbox.com/s/g7ykbg55jj4w4vn/winter-pong-0.3.zip

This is a link to the same file I wanted to upload above, without the contrived double packaging. Now its a simple zip file everyone can extract.

Just unzip where you want to put the game. Dont forget Ruby from http://rubyinstaller.org/.

Detailed documentation is inside the zip.

Heres my submission: http://andrew.pregent.ca/putt3.html

Chrome only, please! Didn't have time to make it cross browser so thats all I tested.

Notes for the judges:

• I'm presuming the "moarpwr" option will count as a hard mode... its definitely more chaotic anyway...
• Press Esc in the main menu to see the exit screen.
• Press Esc during gameplay to see the pause screen.
• Save functionality is implemented using cookies. Refresh the page, and note it will keep the current level.
• The power-ups are the ascii characters that appear on the screen. There are 6 kinds in total, 4 of which deal with time.
• The animated background changes at the bonus round (level 3).

Unfortunately I have been very busy at work lately and I have run out of time to work on my game.

My (half finished) entry is here: http://www.donaldsmay.com/projects/DestroyerOfGalaxies.zip

It does not meet the requirements, but at least there is something to show for it :) .

I had fun though and I look forward to playing everyone's games!

Just to be clear: "12:00AM UTC November 1, 2013" means "00:00 UTC November 1, 2013" in 24 hour time right? (as in 17 hours and 28 minutes from now)

I guess so. I would have prefered a modern time representation like 2013-10-31 23:59:59 UTC without the midnight/noon ambiguity.

I guess so. I would have prefered a modern time representation like 2013-10-31 23:59:59 UTC without the midnight/noon ambiguity.

Please excuse us in the US for being behind the times :P

But yes, 00:00 == 12:00AM == Midnight. UTC.

Too bad i didn't had the time to finish the game, i only got the basic to work, here it is.

Instructions are in the Readme.txt file.

This is my entry for the contest, version 1.0 of Winter-Pong.

Please try it out!

I did not include save functionality, because I did not feel it would improve the game. Instead I put some effort into other things that would add to it; like having smooth, balanced gameplay and adjustable sound. All other mandatory and optional features are implemented at least in some way, although I had to prioritize some.

The game package is at https://www.dropbox.com/s/rc08imb7d7mltlr/winter-pong-1.0.zip.

For installation on Windows you will need Ruby 1.9.3 from http://rubyinstaller.org/. Install it into a directory without spaces and select the options to add it to the path and associate rb and rbw file extensions with it. Then start install-rbSFML.bat from the unziped game package. If you tested the 0.3 version you will not need to repeat these steps.

Double-click one of the rbw files to start the game.

The game should be compatible to other OS, but I could not test this and you will have to do some work to install MRI Ruby, SFML and rbSFML.

Detailed instructions are also inside the package.