Java 4K Game Programming Contest - Year 4 (2006)

Year 4 (2006)

Year 4 marked a period of transition toward making gameplay a priority over graphics and technical accomplishment. Many of the games were fairly simple in design, but aimed to make up for it with engrossing or addictive gameplay.

For the first time in the contest's history, a special forum was set up on JavaGaming.org to host the contest. In addition, the JavaUnlimited.net site became the official site for entries and judging. While judging was originally going to be handled through JavaUnlimited by the Javagaming.org community, pushback from several members resulted in falling back on a more traditional judging system.

After the results came back, Miners4K by Markus Persson was declared the winner. Second place was given to Kevin Glass's Roll4K, and third place was given to Goomba4K by Woogley.

The results of Year 4's judging were significantly better than those of Year 3, in part due to the rule changes which forced the entries to conform to easily executable formats. However, this did not completely eliminate judging issues. Some controversy erupted when two entries (Xero and JSquares) were given lower scores due to technical glitches. Several recommendations were posed to prevent this from happening in future contests, including trimmed mean scoring and verification of judge's scoring before acceptance.

List of Games & Results