Java 4K Game Programming Contest - Year 3 (2005)

Year 3 (2005)

Year 3 was defined by a major influx of professional Java developers, 3D graphics in the games, and a gradual transition to the JavaGaming.org forums. JavaUnlimited also began mirroring the competitors in a permanent archive. While the mirror started as a manually edited HTML page, it eventually grew into a complete content management site with a database back-end.

Judging this year was handled by a panel of three volunteer, professional developers who were not participating in the contest. One of the volunteer judges was Chris Melissinos, Sun's Chief Gaming Officer. The scoring method used was based on the method that mlk had applied the previous year, but was updated to allow the judges to give awards for exceptional gameplay or technological achievements.

While most of the entries were of exceptional quality, T4XI by Kevin Glass (aka kevglass) was chosen as the winner. Besides having extremely original gameplay, it provided exceptional graphics through a pseudo-3D effect that gave perspective to the buildings.

A minor amount of controversy erupted due to entries that judges had failed to score. Entries like JM4K and IsOlation Net were either too complex for the judges to launch, or contained networking components that they couldn't test. After this year's competition, the rules were changed to require that games be self-executable. In addition, contestants were warned in advance about the difficulties in judging networked games.

List of Games
List of Scores: (DHTML) (XLS)