Congratulations to all the authors, and especially the winner(s)! 
Thanks Guys! (Iād like to donate my prize to charity!)
Fair result I reckon - Spiderball was clearly the best in show; great simple idea, very well implemented.
I would have liked a community vote though (despite all the past problems) because I think it would have raised the interest level and weād have got more feedback from casual JGOers if they thought they could take part in the votingā¦
Whatever! If I could have voted Iād have voted for Spiderball too - big cheer for MĆ„ns! Yaaaaay!
Yes, I think the reviews/grades were reasonably fair, although personally I would have liked to see āt4knsā maybe a bit higher up in the āTechnical Scoreā. Hopefully the review text from the judges provides some insight to those scores. Other than that it is hard to find a game with a undeserving score.
The original plan was to include community voting, but for many reason (mainly lack of activity/interest and practical reasons) we decided to skip it.
Thanks to all the judges for their comments and their judging. I canāt say that I disagree with my own scores.
Great job.
Thanks! Congratulations to Markus and Simon as well!
Good games everyone, lots of fun to play them!
Also, a great thanks to the judges - I can tell youāve put a lot of effort into this, very nicely commented judging. Good work!
thanks to appel and the other judges.
[quote=matt hicks (darkfrog)]You lose points for not making your JNLP 1.5+ and making me have to install 1.5 in addition to 1.6.
[/quote]
i have to mention this is because the sound doesnt work in 1.5 - i did ask if the judges would be using 1.5 to test - http://www.java-gaming.org/forums/index.php?topic=17958.msg141481#msg141481 :-\
the judges did do a good job (despite some of them not seeming to understand my game :D) i would also like a community vote next year, to get more interest in the contest - maybe allow anyone to vote so long as they write a short comment to accompany it.
Perhaps we could go a half-and-half route? Community voting is half the score and judge voting is the other half. That keeps things a little more fair in case someone has a crappy game but goes and gets all their friends to come in and vote for their game anyway.
I completely disagree with community voting. The best 2 games I have made in all the 4Ks so far were in last yearās competition, but they werenāt even looked at because most people looked at half or less of the games. And with the list in alphabetical order mine were in the second half. I am sure there are a lot of other people whose games were not looked at either.
The only way to make community voting fair is not to count anybodyās scores unless they provide a score for each game.
Oops - can of worms reopened!
I say keep things just as they are (judges only) but also have a 4th ācommunity awardā winner based solely on public votes (and this is from someone whose games began with āSā & āZā CaptainJester! 
).
If some idiot wants to put in a rubbish game and get all his pals to vote for him, so much the better - no publicity is bad publicity!
Dangnabbit! Itās only a bit of fun after all!
too badā¦ cant believe that āFkConflictā is only 8thā¦ I loved this game 
there are my personal winner
FkConflict
MiniGolf
Spiderball4k
Thief4k
Z4rch
t4kns
Pinball 4K
i agree good idea
i agree that is a problem, there is no reason it cant be done more fairly though - ordering randomly for example, and not showing the currently number of plays or votes for any game until the end of the contest. There could also be a buffer time between the submission deadline and the results to allow for community votes to be a bit fairer.
Thanks man. ;D I think it just shows that there were some great contenders this year. I think I placed respectably in a very competitive pack.
But Iām really enjoying the fact that people (myself included it) enjoy playing it. I loved hearing stories from people that they wasted hours playing it heheh. On slow days at work, Iāll play it 2 or 3 times. Based on that, Iām more proud of it than my Metro4k entry from last year. If I can give someone a few hours of fun, then I know I did my job. 
Neat, third place! =D
Iām very happy with that, considering I kinda bit off more than I could chew.
Oh, and grats to the other winners. I wouldāve liked to see FkConflict slightly higher up as well, as that one really felt like a real āgameā, whatever that is. It was actually FUN. =)
Some comments are odd. For example, āno audioā is sometimes a technical lack, then a presentational, then itās in the overall column.
And I think itās unfair that one game wasnāt properly judged (Scala Pong 4k). I know it violated rule gamma of the rule handbook, but since you canāt verify whether a game is written in Java or any other language that targets the JVM, maybe that rule should be changed. For example, how can anyone say that spiderball4k was written in Java and not in Scala?
Iām rather satisfied that Thief4k got a good overall score despite lower technical and presentational scores. People liked it, but it didnāt appear overly technical or presentational. I think thatās a good sign. ;D
So, because a rule is potentially easy to break without being found out it should be changed? The rule is there because itās a Java4k contest.
I donāt think itās relevant what language you write the app. in, so long as it is compiled down to legal Java bytecode for the submitted binary.
The āmust be javaā rule was originally intended to prevent people submitting a Java app. that simply acted as a stub-launcher for native code.
Java4K - is it about the platform Java, or the language Java?
In this case it doesnāt really matter much, since above and beyond the fact the game was written in Scala, it wasnāt really a game - it was sort of a half attempt at Pong to prove that it was possible to write 4K games in Scala. The description says as much:
āThe key point here was that it was done in Scala rather than Java, just to see if it could be done.ā
For my money that makes it a tech demo, not a game.
Kev
Well, the rule isnāt clear. Are games not written in Java disallowed? In that case, Scala Pong should have been disqualified. Or is it just about the platform? In that case, Scala Pong should have gotten a fair judging, even if itās not much of a game. The problem I see is that the judging is not uniform (apparently the judges couldnāt agree either). And I think thatās unfair.
Iām in favor of allowing games written in other languages, because I think it would be cool and since a rule regarding the implementation language cannot be enforced anyway. I would propose a rule change that submitted games must only contain executable bytecode, no native code, and omit the language.
Alternatively, I would clarify that rule to say that games written in a language other than java are not allowed, and (retroactively) disqualify Scala Pong from the 2008 competition.
I think thatās the point - it isnāt pretty clear, the term āJavaā is ambiguous.
It could be referring to the Java language, or the Java Virtual Machine specification.
Given that Rule 3 specifically mentions āno JNIā, I would interpret āpure Javaā to be referring to the JVM spec, NOT the JLS.