Agreed. Plus it would make the community alive throughout the year and not only from december to march.

I was more thinking, for instance 4 judges would have to write reviews for half of the entries = 2 reviews per game

Nice work, plus it led me to finally learn how to play Mancala

The bouncing particles are a very nice aesthetic approach to the board game, it works quite well. The game is pretty intuitive to play on top of that.

To make it better you could maybe improve the theme of the game: too much Java4K entries follow the "random flashy colors on a black background" theme, so if you have a few bytes left and feel inspired it might be worth giving it a try!

EDIT: Also, the AI is good, but as a newbie I can't really tell up to which point ^^

Good news to my ears! I'll probably enter again this year

Regarding the "10 year" thing, here is an idea: on top of the usual competition, there is a special "challenge" for devs, which is to produce a sequel to any previous Java4K entry. Optionally the entrants could not only compete in the normal compo, but also be ranked in this special "10 Year Challenge category", with specific rankings (based on special criteria ?).

About the judging, while I enjoy the current system, I understand it might be a bit tiring for those judges. My opinion would be to slightly improve it by:
* Asking the judges to write a review for only part of the games (they'll still have to rate them all)
* Having more judges, so that every game can still get enough reviews - and even more ratings.

I just noticed the "Show sources at end of contest" option doesn't seem to work, so I made them public ; while I'm at it, here is a package of the project sources (including the build script), I hope some will find it useful for next year.

On a side note, I kinda started working on an Android remake of the game, nothing serious yet but I'll make sure to share it when I have something playable!

I guess you're right, if no one dares to give scores below 5 it's no finer than the bin system...


I was only suggesting to split the written reviews, not the scoring. Else the rankings would not make sense indeed.

The thing is there's no way you can broadcast music without downloading it. You can broadcast music while downloading it though, and that's what streaming is 

Now after some quick Googling I found a few leads for how to do it. For instance:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6159138/streaming-music-files-in-java points to two existing projects for hosting audio broadcasting servers.
Another common solution would be to use an independent broadcasting server (like IceCast) and make your server send data to it/control it.

One thing that you should consider though is: are you sure you want to use the server to broadcast sound? An alternative would be to simply broadcast the command, and let clients process it themselves.
On one hand using a server for the streaming is probably more flexible, as you can then easily add other sound-related commands without having to modify the clients, but on the other hand it might induce an important traffic.

Haha congrats, you're the first one who mentioned the reference 


Then I guess I'm lucky, I didn't bother at all testing my applet in various environments... But luckily I had to work on the game alternatively on Linux & Windows x)



Now regarding the ranking system, even if I understand that the current way to do it is time consuming for reviewers, I totally agree with Appel in that using 'bins' would make the ranking a bit shady for others. Now, I guess that what takes a lot of time is to write the reviews, so what about splitting the games between the judges? They would still have to give grades to everyone (else it wouldn't be fair), but only write reviews for a subset. For instance, 2 reviews per game would be fair enough.

Another (smaller) suggestion: an alternative to the idea of bins would be to give notes between 0 and 10, they can easily be converted to percents once averaged, and are probably faster to choose.

This seems like a common "data persistance" problem, what about this:

- You store everything on your DataBase
- When you launch the server, at first its "active player list" is empty
- When someone "becomes active", you fetch information about him from the DB and store him in your player list
- When someone "becomes passive", you save the updated information to the DB and remove him from the player list
- From times to times, you save everything to the DB, just in case

I think what you're looking for is:



Example:

dx = 5m, dy = 10m, dt = 2s
If you want a time period of 1s, then:

distanceintervalx = 5 * 1 / 2 = 2.5 m/s
distanceintervaly = 10 * 1 / 2 = 5 m/s

That's what we usually call speed 

If "jumping" means "changing player.z", then the problem is not here, since player.z is modified nowhere in the code your shared.

A good point to start investigating would be to trace or add break points to every place where player.z is edited, and see what happens when you change direction.

Wow, 1st place, really? I didn't expect this at all, I'm glad you liked my game, thanks!

Indeed I felt like The Little Scientist might be a good start for a real game... If I find the time maybe I'll start making a mobile app out of it, who knows

Anyway thank you Appel for setting up this contest, I learned a lot of things by taking part to it. See you next year

Congrats ZeroOne!

I'm glad you're the one who reached the 1st place, given the huge number of awesome (Open Source*) games you made  

(*Your code actually helped me getting started with my own entry )

Indeed that's impressive. All games since the inception of Java4k would fit on a 3-1/2 inch floppy disk 

Are we expected to vote 0 or 5 for our own games? 

Perhaps the 's' was 1 byte too much for 4096B

Nice game btw, I'm always impressed by those 3D games that fit in a such small file.

Awesome.

From the wiki page:

"Exaclan (エグザクラン Eguzakuran?) is a virtual game [...] To win the game, one must collect all six "stars". The stars are weapons that, when used, display a bugged symbol consisting of a star and several Java[1] code snippets."

I love the concept, never saw it before!
Lvl 4 was a bit too hard for me too, but overall the game is pretty cool. Congrats!

I just made a new version of the game, by removing a few not-so-good ideas and making the game a bit more fun.

Removed
- The rocket direction being important when changing planets (now you always land on the next one)
- The planet names
- The antialiasing trigger (it didn't change anything performance-wise on my netbook actually)

Added
- Some diversity in the planets (rocks & uranium pillars)

I now have like 80 bytes left, not sure yet what I should do with these  

Interesting maze game! The graphics are quite pleasing, the only thing is that the game is a bit too hard for me
I hardly passed the 2nd level, and I can't think of any working combination for the 3rd one

+1 for the solver, if you eventually have to choose between that and an editor, I would actually enjoy the solver more.

Fear me, because I reached the insane score of 144560 points !!1

Hmm it looks like everyone gets confused by this...
I just added ra4king's hint to the game instructions

Simple yet original game, I enjoyed it! I'm pretty bad at those kind of games though.

Is the Blonde Redhead reference deliberate?

It's randomly generated, but it should always be more or less the same.

There is a hack, press Alt+F4 to build a rocket instantly

Not sure how I did exactly... But what I can tell you is that I quickly made several laboratories!

Ooooh *nostalgia*

Impressive 4K game btw, it's pretty amazing to watch these guys building stuff.

You're right, but it's all about the ratio faking effort/worth of faking it ^^


EDIT:


You sir are a gentleman and a scholar. Totally doing that for my next entries.


Now here is the author's score:

Yeah, but would anyone fake it?

Ok guys I edited the OP to add the high scores!
From now on it's 'screenshot or didn't happen' 

Impressive!