2009 Winners

=First Place - Joshua Brown= Game - Tyrian School - Montmorency Secondary College Prize $2500

Tyrian Review
The Game Vision by game creator Joshua Brown

Tyrian harbours crisp identifiable graphics with luscious eye-pleasing scenery created through tiling. As a whole Tyrian has fantastic graphics, as Daniel Cook (Danc) has done a most brilliant job creating them. Tyrian is all about evading and destroying enemies hastily as they threaten to overwhelm you with masses of waves of enemies. Great sound effects accompanied by awesome game-play and visuals result in a popular, everlasting game. Part of the original Tyrian’s identity was the rich storyline that Jason Emery weaved in (Whom was also the programmer). I would have liked to include a storyline and extra levels but such a time constraint as starting two months late is the sort of thing that prevents you from polishing the game and including aspects you wish were in there.

The game itself has two modes; one and two player with the same three levels for both modes. The first level is a mere introduction, I’m confident that people can pass through the level on their first or second attempt. The game begins in the 2nd level, where new enemies are introduced and spawned almost constantly, forcing you to keep your hands nimble to survive. The maps and levels are all hand-crafted, two of my friends aided me in the creation of the second level by producing the scenery with a tool I programmed. I have played through it myself and found it quite challenging. Playing with two players helps greatly because each player can be in charge of one side of the screen, which breaks down a lot of the action. You may find yourself wondering what exactly is happening; that’s part of the fun of Tyrian. There can be so many explosions enemies and gunfire all on the screen at once you lose track of what is going where and where you are. I am confident in my game and find it highly entertaining.

Our impressions Playing Tyrian you soon realise that Josh is a big fan of games of this classic genre. The intensity of the gameplay increases exponentially until after only having been playing for about thirty seconds you are already in frantic mode, dashing your ship all over the screen deciding whether to fight or evade the tirade of endless enemies heading your way.

Josh did a fantastic job of incorporating in his game, exactly what it takes for games like this to be fun and addictive. His use of sound and graphics was exceptional and two player mode was a very nice addition also. This was exactly the type of game we had in mind for SwinGame 09 competition and encourage everyone reading this to download the game give it a go, you wont be disappointed. We at SwinGame are keen to see Josh does next and congratulate him for his fantastic effort.

=Open Category Winners - Team Causality= Team Causality members (Timothy Wilson, Jeffrey Christiansen & Evan Wallace) Game - Hourglass School - Box Hill High School Prize $1000

Hourglass Review
The Game Vision by one of the game's creators Timothy Wilson

The vision of Hourglass is to make a puzzle platform game with lots of mind-bending time travel puzzles, as games like this often lack many real hard puzzles. The aim was to have the player still existing in time so that they can see their past selves, change their actions somewhat and cause paradoxes. Also, it was necessary to create a few elements(portals, platforms, reverse time) and combine them to make puzzles. As we discovered this makes puzzle making hard as there are often very easy solutions to good ideas. I tried to make paradoxes only happen when something really impossible occurs, unfortunately this wasn't feasible for reverse time instances. For example killing a past self is a paradox while causing a box to loop through time infinitely, though strange, is not a paradox.

The concept started after I played Chronotron (an internet game) a bit over a year ago. Chronotron has the same basic idea of Hourglass but has a lot less elements. I started thinking; What if boxes could be bought back in time? What if time could be reversed? What if you could time travel from anywhere to any when? I made a game in GameMaker in an attempt to add these ideas. It ended up with about 4 levels (level 1, 2,4,6 of Hourglass) and only had the box carrying through time element. I tried adding reverse time but the engine was just too buggy for it to work and on top of that boxes would often paradox when there were large stacks (level 6). Game Maker itself wasn't suited for it because a game like this needs precise control over action order which just isn't there and arrays don't initialise with default values. After not working on it for a while my brother discovered the SwinGame SDK at the start of May. I then remade the game without the buggy box behaviour and expanded it from there. By the start of this term I managed to add quite a few elements and decided to enter it in the competition. I asked my friends to help with some graphics and stuff and now here we are.

Our impressions From the moment we first ran Hourglass we could tell that this was going to be a unique entry. The line in the the story page "In an attempt to shut it down by hand, he got too close to the danger area, and had his head replaced by that of small rhinoceros" attests to this fact better than anything. The idea behind this game was very interesting being that of a strategic time based puzzle game. The realization of this idea in the game was very impressive and resulted in plenty of intriguing game play.

The game was fully functional when it was submitted and even included a solid level editor for those who wanted to extend their game beyond the mind blowing forty five levels already included. Although this game obviously did not fit into the arcade category it was clearly the winner of the Open. I encourage you all to download and play Hourglass, it represents what you can achieve when you have the right balance of imagination, determination and technical skills. We at SwinGame congratulate Tim, Jeffrey and Evan for their fantastic effort and look forward to whatever their next project might be.

=Second Place - Patrick Thien= Game - Maze Escape School - Camberwell Grammar School Prize $1000

Maze Escape Review
The Game Vision by game creator Patrick Thien

Maze Escape is adapted from a game that I originally wrote in flash, but much improved as the original was never completed. For this game, I wanted the main focus to be on solving the maze and not turning it into a puzzle game with switches and one way doors etc. So, i kept it simple adding the red monsters for a bit of interest and the collectible stars as incentive to replay levels to collect them all.

Unfortunately I found out about the SwinGame competition a bit late in the game, and so it is not as polished as i would have liked, but still complete.

=Third Place - Team Curtain Fire= Team Curtain Fire members (Josh Chittick and Jesse Vaitkus) School - Bendigo Senior Secondary College  Game - Curtain Fire Prize $500

Curtain Fire Review
The Game Vision by one of the game's creators Josh Chittick

My vision for this game was a fairly simple and addictive Curtain Fire (What it is named after) / Bullet Hell kind of Vertical Shooter. Rather than just die as you do in those games I chose to go with subtracting points, so it's more about getting stuck to the screen and not wanting / being able too leave.

While I had quite a few issues getting this going (Swingame.dll throwing errors when implementing audio, not working on Linux etc) I think we have still reached a playable state and it is quite addictive. :)

Our impressions Josh and Jesse did a great job in executing a clear vision for a game. They had the arcade style in mind and they did not make the usual error of entrants of trying to make a game that is too complicated in a short period of time. Their game has all the elements that entrants need, a clear arcade style, interactive and engaging game play, smart use of graphics and no bugs. The game also leaves you with plenty of ideas for improvements such as extra types of enemies and levels that could easily be added in the future. The team had some problems with their implementation of sound so this version does not have that yet but this is not a major flaw. We congratulate Josh and Jesse for getting the job done and coming up with a stylish game in the process.