E4 and the Golden Joysticks Team Up For 'Grand Master Flash' Award
Flash is one of the most recent bastions of the independent game developer. I say this because I fancy myself as a fairly talented flash developer. I'm also extremely modest. As such, any time there is major recognition of anyone in this field, it makes me feel slightly more validated for loving the sometimes reviled little web plugin.
In its 26th year, The Golden Joystick Awards has teamed up with E4.com to bring a new category to their prestigious annual ceremony, titled 'E4.com Grand Master Flash Award'. This award will honor excellence in the area of flash game development. The winner will receive a £5,000 commission, a spot on the E4 web page and the much revered Golden Joystick Award.
Anyone is free to enter with submissions filed on their web page (http://www.e4.com/joystick). The deadline is September 15th, so if you don't have anything to show, now would be an excellent time to start.
A short list of 10 contestants will be chosen by a panel of judges, at which point it is up to the general gaming public (you!) to choose which game deserves to win. To name just a few of the panel of judges:
- Rob Manuel: co-founder of B3ta
- Alice Taylor: founder of the popular gaming blog Wonderland
- Kieran O'Neill: co-founder of gaming social network
- Jon Blyth: Playfire.com and influential games writer
More judges will be announced at a later date. Rob Manuel will also be blogging about his six week "write a game from scratch" project from the Grand Master Flash web page (http://www.e4.com/joystick). This should prove to be an interesting look at the development and design process of an independent game.
As a side note, anyone interested in developing a game for this competition who does not have flash, or does not wish to spend the money for a full retail copy may be interested in Adobe's Open Flex SDK. It's free, cross-platform, open source, and it is an excellent learning platform for budding developers:
Open Flex SDK at Adobe
FlashDevelop (Excelent .NET based IDE for flash development)
Documentation for Flex
Asterick
Posted to Video Games on 31 July 2008
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