5 Button Winners!
February 22nd, 2012
The results are in for the winners of the 5 button competition! Drum roll, please…
1st Place (1200€): Rakete, by Mario von Rickenbach
2nd Place (600€): Porkerpillar, by Nathan Fouts
3rd Place (200€): Revolution, by Felix P
Our friends at 02L > Outside Standing Level have a write up of the event, as well as a quick recap of how the votes were tallied in case you missed it.
Although I couldn’t make it, our man on the scene, Pete Angstadt, was able to check out the competition in beautiful (and very cold) Berlin, Germany:
For those who don’t know me, I’m Peter Angstadt, and I write some of the monthly round up posts (including the 5 Button Roundup). I’ve been in Dresden, Germany recently and last week decided to take the couple hour train ride to Berlin to attend the Stattbad Media 5 Button Competition. I wanted to check out the games on the actual hardware, see how the audience reacted, and help out with the event. It turned out to be a great time, and I thought I’d share some of the highlights.
The competition took place in the Stattbad Gallery, an old re-purposed swimming center. It’s a big building with a bunch of empty pools, one of which housed a crazy triangular skateboard ramp. In another pool room there was a giant screen and five big buttons set up for the competition. The O2L guys set up the whole competition, fired up each game and managed the audience voting. As the event got going the audience streamed in, filling up the area around and inside the pool. At peak time there was close to 200 people!
I hung out down in the pool near the five buttons with a bullhorn. Before each game started we encouraged new players to take a spot at a button, introduced the game, and start it up. After a bit we’d introduce a new game and round up new players. We cycled through all finalists/runners-up multiple times so as many people as possible were able to try each game.
The audience really enjoyed all of the games. Notably, they got father than I ever did in Rakete, proving themselves to be excellent at steering the rocket as a five person team. And much to my surprise, the audience was able beat Individual Medley Relay. Everyone cheered when the five person controlled swimmer completed the final lap. In another tricky game, Revolution, people glimpsed a little bit of the magic but it wasn’t until later on during another session (with a lot of coaching) that a group of 5 friends were able to complete it.
Close to midnight, after all the games were played and votes tallied, DJs set up near the big screen started dropping phat beats and such. We let the audience play what they wanted and lots of people hung around to enjoy the party late into the night. Everyone had a great time and I want to congratulate and thank all the entrants and finalists/runners-up for making the night a big success!
Congrats to all the winners from everyone at EGP!
We're a group of indie game developers, running a friendly competition every month. The rules: Make a game based on the month's theme, and don't spend more than 7 days. New games posted at the end of every month.
13 Comments, Comment or Ping
Oh wow, looks like awesome fun. The buttons are much much bigger than I imagined too! Congrats for throwing a great event, and congrats to the winners. :)
February 22nd, 2012
Wow!! Thanks!!
That event looked super awesome – is there any more photos/videos of the night that we could see? (Especially of R-evolution, er, maybe during the bit where people were having trouble…)
February 22nd, 2012
@ FELIX P
Send me an email at pete.angst (on gmail) and I’ll give you some more info as well as all the pictures I have of people playing (don’t have any videos though, sorry).
February 22nd, 2012
Congratulations to the winners, and congratulations to the organisers for putting together what looks a great event – from the photos it looks like it was lots of fun.
I was wondering – were all the 23 finalists/runners up played at the event?
February 23rd, 2012
Congrats to the winners! You are awesome!
February 23rd, 2012
@David: thanks! it was hard but definitely rewarding!
of the 10 finalists + 13 runners we had 22 games at last, shown twice in about 4 hours. 48 total games produced, 22 displayed games (with almost 130 emails exchanged with the runners for the fixes).. hell of numbers!
February 23rd, 2012
Oh cool! Thanks! That’s so exciting to hear.
Looks like an amazing party, I wish I could have been.
Thanks to everyone that organized the event!
@Pete Angstadt
I wrote you via email, with the hope there’s some shots of people playing Porkerpillar.
February 23rd, 2012
The event seems to have been lots of fun! And congratulations to the winners!
@Pete: I’d also like to see some more images of the night. I imagine, the other developers as well. Perhaps you could just upload a collection to flickr or something?
February 23rd, 2012
I got to weigh in on this… I was there, and had an absolute BLAST with the incredible display of talent. It was an awesome showcase of indie game-makers and such a cool idea to host it in a swimming pool! Rakete was definitely my favorite game, it was beautifully drawn, incredibly smooth, and required a positively ridiculous amount of team-work to control that five-thrustered beast… I also thought the game Uprok was fantastic, but I may be biased, because I annihilated the other players ftw :D SUCH a fun night out, can’t wait for the next one… +1, thumbs up, gold stars, shared etc.
February 24th, 2012
Congrats to all the winners!!!!
you made great games!!!
February 25th, 2012
For those of you who want to see a full set of all the pictures I took, you can download them here:
medium res (~6mb): http://www.turtle-sandbox.com/tempimg/stattbad.zip
large res (~21mb): http://www.turtle-sandbox.com/tempimg/stattbadlarge.zip
I didn’t get a chance to photograph every game, but there are quite a few in there!
February 26th, 2012
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