“Just go make something. But really you want to do more than that. You want to create something, then you want to release it, you want feedback on it and you want to keep getting better.” – Chet Faliszek (Valve) to budding game developers.
Throughout their studies of becoming successful game-scholars, 1st year Games Computing students at the Lincoln School of Computer Science are being thought about game design tools to quickly develop and extend original game ideas into fully fledged playable games. The use of game developing challenges is one of our favourite approaches to the introductory of game studies. The rules of the challenge: Make a game based on a given theme, within the available time scale. Volunteering students present and discuss their game in front of a playful crowd made out of their colleagues and university staff members. The given theme for this challenge is “One Button Games” – games that use a range of mechanics based around the idea that a player may only use one button only. Such games are fairly popular amongst casual games such as “B.U.T.T.O.N“, “Super Action RPG” or “Canabalt“. Recently, Gamasutra wrote a rather extensive article about the game design recommendations for One Button Games.
We are very pleased to share with you some of the submissions for the 2012 One Button Game Challenge. Feel free to have a look at the video, download and play the games!
Furthermore you can find the results of the 2011 Game Challenges using the following links: One Button Challenge 2011 / ASCII Challenge 2011. Enjoy the games, and feel free to share them with your friends and family!
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Legend of Groomp by Alex Saye (Contact) A tower defense game where you must defend against hordes of soldiers using up to nine different spells. Spells are cast by either tapping or holding the Space bar. Get experience by killing enemies to unlock more spells. Spells can be stacked on top of each other and combined – for instance, fire spreads easily to other enemies if used with the spell push! |
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Volley Orange by Jamie Bloor (Contact) Collect all the gold apples using the oranges to proceed to the next level! Can you find the optimal way through all the levels? |
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Balloon Button by Mike Thompson (Contact) Control a hot air balloon through a vast and rich environment! Collect the sheep to get more points, and grab the fuel to fly even further! |