Justin Lloyd

I attended Westwood College on Saturday, June 11th, to give a short talk about "becoming a success in the games industry" and also judge the Westwood College 3rd Annual 2D Game Competition, and I now have the details about the various category winners.

And the winners are:

• Best Cross-Platform: Stupid Robot
• 3rd Place: Stupid Robot
• People’s Choice: BioLancer
• 2nd Place: BioLancer
• Most Innovative Use of Flash (Adobe Award): Catch a Wav
• 1st Place: Bio

Overall I was pleased with the results, but personally felt that Stupid Robot deserved a much higher placing (it was also my personal favourite), as it offered a complete casual game experience, full tutorial and reasonable graphics. I will admit that the game play was not innovative, but it was reasonably well executed in the time available to the team.

Each of the categories received a very nice award designed and created by GROW it 3D, a rapid fabrication and prototyping company that uses various technologies for creating physical representations from 3D models in a semi-automated fashion.

This technology really is cutting-edge and part of our future, think of a printer that prints in three dimensions, and the actual devices themselves are coming down in price, whilst the capabilities are increasing.

The $50 multi-format CD/DVD recorder in your computer that records on DVD costing pennies was once the size of my full-tower workstation, recorded only CD’s at 1x speed and cost around $8,000, not including the $2,000 software package to layout the discs. Each disc took about an hour to record, and if you messed up, you started over with a new $50 blank CD-R. The progress from the early 1990’s to today in CD and DVD recording technology, and the commensurate reduction in price to sub-$100 levels is exactly what will happen with these 3D fabrication devices in the next 20 years.

Unfortunately I did not have the presence of mind to take pictures of the award, and looking through my SenseCam images I cannot find a good shot of the individual awards. Hopefully somebody over at Westwood College will officially announce the winners along with photos of each team and their awards.

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