Well, the GameDev.net contest results are back…

…and I didn't win.

The good news is, out of a lineup of twenty entries, I placed fifth (and another GM game placed third).

The judges comments (unedited) are reproduced below:

"There's a beautiful vision here, but it's just not finished enough - in particular it's marred by UI issues. I had serious trouble using the Trade dialog, but general issues like visual feedback when clicking buttons or close buttons on dialogs need to be fixed. More movement and dynamic stuff in general would be good; in particular some of the sequences like harvesting and undocking - even the startup splash screens - are currently unexplained 'wait times' (so you could, for example, have the hold space counter tick down slowly when harvesting instead of dropping to 0 immediately). There's no quit button on the main menu, you can't access the options menu from in-game and I couldn't find a 'Save Game' option anywhere… Would be nice if you could dock with ports from the 3D view. Music is good but I didn't hear any sound effects other than the occasional lapping of waves. Graphics needs some work - things like reflection are nice icing, but you've got more fundamental problems with low-resolution textures and filtering (particularly on the main menu screen). When another ship is sailing away from you their name appears to be backwards :-) Framerate generally good but stutters periodically. It's moddable, woo! Some errors silently coped with, others throw up a user-unfriendly dialog (e.g. the 'Start In' misconfig error). Crashes on exit when program directory is read-only and doesn't handle Alt-Tab very well (should pause the music when not active).

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A huge (in every possible metric) and ambitious entry, but it needs quite a bit of polish and testing before it's ready to ship. There are some really great ideas in here. I'd really like to see some more work done on this, if only to see if it'll end up on the shelves someday.

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Pauses and stutters, along with run bugs mar gameplay. As a gamemaker game this is very advanced, however gamemaker may not have been the best technology to make this with: the mouse UI suffers horribly, to the point of being a lesson in things not to do with a GUI. Graphics are frequently killed by non-existent filtering (again, likely a gamemaker limitation)."

…While a bit disappointed, I am nonetheless encouraged by many things here. Particularly the fact that, with a few months' more casual work (not main-project work, but as a side project) it could be good enough to *gasp* go commercial! (That is, when all the mentioned bugs are fixed)

Plus, I might just scrape a few prizes out of this mess. I'm definitely getting a video capture software; and maybe a few books and a game. I'll have to see.

So, this is now my plan for Lions of the Atlantic:

1. Fix all noted bugs and problems. This will probably take about a month of "casual programming."

2. Release (limited demo) on 64Digits. Get feedback, fix problems.

3. Release (updated demo) on GMC. Same routine.

4. Look into publishing options.

5. Maybe sell the game?

In the meantime, I will continue development on my other major project. Maybe I'll find time to finish EotS, and maybe not - we'll have to see. IBO is having wierd speed issues that I'll have to fix later. And Gel is in the "do another level? Maybe tomorrow" phase - it will be finished when it's finished.