Porkerpillar Wins!

Porkerpillar has won 2nd place in an international game development competition!

The babies cheer wildly!

Judging
The "5 Button competition", held recently through December and January and run by Experimental Gameplay Project and 02L, tasked game developers to make a game that

• Uses only 5 buttons, and
• Is fun to play in a party setting with multiple people at once.

There were a total of 48 games entered into the contest with ideas ranging from controlling individual parts of a man swimming to finding out that a triangle really does love a square.

Games were judged initially before the show, with a contest team selecting a group of finalist games and runners-up.  The idea being that the finalists would be offered to be played at the party, and if there was time, more games from the runners-up would be shown as well. The games were judged in the following manner:

• 20% of the public voting
• 30% of the average of the STATTMEDIA crew's votes 
• 50% of the average of the blue ribbon jury votes: Pete Angstadt (EA, Havoc, Turtle-Sandbox), Thorsten Wiedemann (AMAZE festival)

Players standing on the custom buttons at the event. (Image by Pete Angstadt)

 The actual event was held in a super-hip, re-purposed swimming center-turned-art gallery (of course!)
 One of the jury members took pictures and wrote about the event here: http://experimentalgameplay.com/blog/2012/02/5-button-winners/

Gamers playing Porkerpillar. (Image by Pete Angstadt)

Winners
The first place winner was a game called Rakete which sounds really neat: each button (and thus player) controls a thruster on a spaceship and players try to guide the ship to a destination together. Here's some footage of the game being played.

The third player winner sounds neat as well, Re-evolution, which appears to be an interesting racing game (though I couldn't get it to work on my computer because of the keyboard ghosting issues).

Our game Porkerpillar asks players to help babies get back to their mom by riding a strange caterpillar+pig creature. I promise he's friendly! You can check out more screens of the game and play it here: Porkerpillar.

Here's some video as well:


The Future
Now that Porkerpillar was proven to be a crowd favorite we may act on some more ideas we had for expanding the game universe, including new, trippy environments, and more puzzly obstacles. Plus a real game platform on which to play it! Probably rhymes with "my tone" or "bye dad".