The video had a different background. The very first level(intro_impossible) there is no paintball. You will die attempting to jump. The next level will load (intro) and spawns a paintball that you can shoot. If you die on this level it will load level intro again that has the paintball.

Okay the part I'm stuck on.

I will PM you.

I have written up a post mortem of everything here: http://www.gamedev.net/blog/1587/entry-2260373-the-judges-post-mortem/

Mouse 1 shoots the paintball (I believe this was in the readme)

It is unfortunately not in the readme included with the final submission.

The blog posts were virtually mandatory and it was detailed within my blog post. Including a video.

With 34 final submissions, there are somewhere on the order of 100 blog posts floating around. Reading them all was not an option given various external time pressures, so I endeavoured not to read journals during the judging phase, to avoid conferring an unfair advantage. This was a miss on my part, and a sad side effect of the day job not always staying a day job :/

One of the (relatively few) issues with this year's competition, I think, is that we didn't establish a strong baseline methodology for scoring. My impression is that I may have been scoring the various categories along somewhat different axis than the other judges. In particular, I was endeavouring to judge these from a customer perspective - i.e. someone who has just downloaded your game from a website, and has no real context. From that perspective, a game that doesn't explain it's own mechanics is not a good experience for the player.

With 34 final submissions, there are somewhere on the order of 100 blog posts floating around. Reading them all was not an option given various external time pressures, so I endeavoured not to read journals during the judging phase, to avoid conferring an unfair advantage. This was a miss on my part, and a sad side effect of the day job not always staying a day job :/

I was endeavouring to judge these from a customer perspective - i.e. someone who has just downloaded your game from a website, and has no real context. From that perspective, a game that doesn't explain it's own mechanics is not a good experience for the player.

I can sympathize about you missing the blog post regarding the shooting mechanic.

But I can not sympathize with you that for a PC game that shows the mouse cursor on the screen (its use was required to select 'New Game' to even load the first level) and moves when you move your mouse that you didn't instinctively attempt to use the primary controller on your computer. Especially, an avid PC user as yourself. In the review you stated that you attempted the game for "ten minutes," but not once attempted to use the mouse? I am sure you can understand my disappointment with that.

Before this particular slant of the thread goes further into a direction no one wants it to go, I would ask that it stop.

I was at a conference when the winners were announced, so congrats to the winners. Thank you too judges and for the excellent writ-ups. They are very helpful.
This competition has done 3 things for me personally:
1. It helped me jump right into the gamedev.net community in which i was more of just an observer then actually doing anything.
2. It has given me good feedback on how to make some things better.
3. It has validated some choices I have made recently. I left my 9-5 programming job 3 months ago to pursue this industry and I just didn't know if I would be able to cut it at all. I didn't win this competition but I have only been a game developer for 3 months, and I was still very close to placing in this. In that regard I feel validated in this choice. So thank you to all of you. (BTW while I did leave my job, I still pickup webapp jobs and some logo so don't cal me bat-poop crazy for doing that. I'm still paying the bills)

3. It has validated some choices I have made recently. I left my 9-5 programming job 3 months ago to pursue this industry and I just didn't know if I would be able to cut it at all. I didn't win this competition but I have only been a game developer for 3 months, and I was still very close to placing in this. In that regard I feel validated in this choice. So thank you to all of you. (BTW while I did leave my job, I still pickup webapp jobs and some logo so don't cal me bat-poop crazy for doing that. I'm still paying the bills)

Same here actually. But unlike you, I AM bat-poop crazy! MUAHAHA!

Hey all, well done to everybody. I've just been replaying the winning entries, and they really are great.

I am delighted to have placed 5th as well, so thank you judges.

I have just recorded a quick video walkthrough of my game from start to finish. From the feedback I've had it seems that level 8 and level 10 were the hardest, in fact I am not aware that anybody managed to solve level 10 on their own?

Watch it here.

[attachment=24192:Save My Toys (thumb).png]

(For some reason YouTube sapped all the detail out of the video, difference in codecs maybe - at least it still gets the point across).

As some have come to know, I've joined this competition to test out Unity, and declared I would be using it in the future.

For those that asked about it, you may now find tangible results on my previous project being ported to Unity here:

http://www.gamedev.net/blog/1753-grand-strategy-space-war/

I've already compared dev time between my original environment (dart lang) with Unity.