Where the World comes to Play, Make and Share games
We’re aware of the problem with the Instant Play add-on not working with Firefox 3.0. We asked them to make a small change during Beta testing…but they haven’t done anything about it, so we’re working on doing the fixes at our end. No eta at the moment, but we’ll keep you posted here on the Glog.
If anything the Ancient Civilisation competition has been even harder to judge than the Winter one. We had a tough time whittling our rather lengthy shortlist down to the three finest entries, so much wheat, so little chaff. Finally though, we proudly present the winners of YoYo Games Ancient Civilisation competition:
1st Place, [$1,000]:
Ancient Ants Adventure by RedSystem
Another great isometric shooter from RedSystem. You are a race of (Egyptian?) ants, fighting tooth and claw for survival against a compelling range of nasties. We were particularly impressed by the professional finish, the variety in the gameplay, and the necessity to employ tactical foresight to get through the game. Altogether an excellent package combining beautiful graphics, humorous gameplay and that crucial addictive quality: a YoYo Games must play, well deserving of first prize.
2nd Place [$500]:
Caveman Craig by RhysAndrews
The finest caveman simulator we have ever played. The game combines beautiful graphics with a surprisingly challenging battle for survival. Life as a caveman is tough, especially when you’ve got to train everyone yourself. The implementation of a quick save feature in this game really made it: you will be ravaged by dinosaurs and being able to reload makes the grizzly experience less painful.
3rd Place, [$250]:
Tut’s Test by KCLC
A really well implemented 3D puzzle game with a lot of charm. The premise of the game is an unorthodox job interview for the role of pyramid builder (sought after?), but in fact sees you manipulating blocks across hazardous grids to rescue other blocks. Tut’s Test is truly testing and achieving the perfect score can become something of a compulsion. A really neat package with fiendishly well designed puzzles.
Huge congratulations to the winners and our commiserations to all the runners up, the competition really was fierce. Here’s a list of notable mentions representing the best of the rest, and those who made it so close:
Sixty Five Million and One BC
Robbie Swifthand and the Orb of Mysteries
Theseus and the Maze
Legends of the Middle Ages
Mubbly Tower
Ancient War
Eternal Trial
Icarus’ Flight
Agartha
Visit
Aztec God
Spartan
Zaiden
Falling Troy
Teocalli
Crater Impact
Meanwhile, elsewhere on YoYo Games…
The next competition is up, up and away. The theme, Co-Operation, was selected by you, the users, and now we, the staff, have managed to get it organised (sorry for the delay) . The competition closes on August 24th and all the normal rules apply, check out the competition page.
-Jim
I can’t believe how long it’s taken to get round to writing here…. tempus fugit.
Thought I’d start with performance issues. Some of you have no doubt noticed that we’ve been having a few hiccups in the last month. We’ve put another 4GB of main memory in the Web Server and we’re now running more Mongrels than you could find in Hyde Park if you wore steak slippers.
We also think we’ve found a bug in Apache and are currently testing a fix on staging. I think the outlook is much better as a result of these changes. We’ve also put Clayton on a “work from home” roster so he’s available to resolve issues outside of UK office hours, especially at weekends when the load increases.
Bad news on the Apple front. The developer has run into problems with Lazarus (in case you don’t know Lazarus is a Pascal based Rapid Application Development platform that we’re using to do the port !). This means we are waiting for fixes from the Lazarus team and our schedule is at their mercy. I guess we’re now looking at July for the earliest chance of an early Beta. I know many of you will be disappointed by this….me included.
HOWEVER, the good news is it looks like we can go into a limited Beta with the runner written in C++. I’ll post details of how to sign up for this as soon as I have them. This will almost certainly be available this month.
Finally I’m busy looking at the submissions for competition 02 and I look forward to seeing an announcement of the winners by the end of this week.
A few of you are worried that your games aren’t converting to instant play…or even that your game isn’t uploading properly. Be patient, we realize the server move was a bit badly timed for the competition and we will be very understanding when we review the submissions for the first time this week.
Sandy
Many of you will have seen the info I posted on the GMC yesterday. (The GMC server didn’t suffer badly). We had a “brown out” in the new data centre about mid-day UK time. The result was a lot of server downtime in the afternoon (UK Time). Problem seemed to have been solved when we left the office early evening, but when I got home just before 8pm the applications (not the servers) on the main Web server crashed. Seems to have been a load problem as you all started coming online quickly, combined with some Apache setup issues that we have resolved. My frustration was multiplied by not knowing personally how to reset the apps (I can restart a server from home)….combined with the fact that both sys admins were out for the evening..
…I’ve apologised on the GMC already, but adding my sincere regrets here too. We’ve had the odd DOS attack or app problem before, but never had more than an hour or two unplanned downtime 
Didn’t sleep much last night..it was agony knowing I couldn’t do anything (the guys are going to train me on Monday) and we will monitor the site closely over the weekend.
I hope that everything runs smoothly for you from now on ….
Sandy
This should hopefully be the final word on the server move. It looks like the DNS settings have now propagated and everyone should be reaching the new servers when they load YoYoGames.com. A few teething problems have been ironed out, in particular the virus scanning issue – If you’ve uploaded a game since the site went live again it should now be being scanned automatically, and will appear soon (if not already).
Time to start uploading those competition entries. I can now confirm a final deadline extension of 7 days, compensation for the 7 days we were offline, thus the final deadline for competition entries is now midnight of Sunday 4th of May – good luck to all the entrants.
Any remaining niggles should get sorted out over the next few days, you patience is very much appreciated.
Meanwhile, elsewhere on YYG…
The community have been voting to select the theme for Competition03 and the votes are in. It was a close run race, with a fair bit of politicking and some great nominations. A total of 551 votes were cast across the six themes, here’s how the results broke down:
Co-operation —– 24%
Unreality ———- 23%
Retro ————— 16%
Anti-Depressant - 13%
Time —————- 13%
Opposites ——— 10%
Which means Co-Operation is our new competition theme, just pipping “Unreality” to the post. Expect to see a full competition page on YYG in the near future. For now get thinking about how you can incorporate Co-operation as a theme into the next big thing to hit casual gaming…
-Jim
Just thought I’d add a quick comment that we’re 95% there on the data centre move. Sorry that it took longer than expected, but the last thing we wanted to do was mess up the site. For those of you trying to post games for the competition, don’t worry we’ll extend the deadline by at least one week.
We’re still not on the new servers….I presume the smarter members of the GMC have worked out that we didn’t get this done by end of Friday and then we hit the weekend……… We’re still a small company, so most people take the weekend off….should all be fixed Monday. This is one of the reasons why I didn’t announce a new deadline for the latest competition until I knew that the new servers were online…..everything should be fixed tomorrow (Monday, UK time)), so look out for the revised competition deadline…..
Just a quick update.
As Sandy mentioned previously the Ancient Civilisation competition deadline has been extended to compensate for the downtime as a result of the ongoing server move. The new deadline will provisionally be Wednesday the 30th of April (Midnight GMT as usual).
While on the subject of competitions, competition03 has already got under way on the GMC. This time the theme will be decided by the YYG community – A user-generated competition for user-generated games. A number of themes have been nominated and will be put to the vote this weekend. See the voting post on the GMC to have your say.
-Jim
Sorry for not posting…I thought the glog had been locked for writing along with the rest of the site (except the GMC of course)
You’ll have probably noticed that the move is taking a long time
BUT, the good news is that
Sandy