I do not mean to disrepect or in anyway marginalise the eventual winners of this competition, in fact, to win in such a low-key contest deserves extra kudos.
It’s just, I was expecting more from Kongregate. There was prize money! A fun competition! A whole new platform and audience!
And we got one feature on the front screen, which was more appealing to developers then to game players.
For the whole contest, all the Unity games were kept in that little box, on the second screen, half way down a list. With no other identifier then “Unity”
No blog posts, tweets, staff picks, acknowledgement that the contest was going on, or counting down, or finishing.
I guess Kongregate doesn’t need us enough to promote us more.
I am alittle biased, as I did take part and performed poorly, but I think I speak some truth.
I was looking in the Kongregate forums awhile ago (btw flash devs hate our guts lol). And their was talk about moving the unity games to the correct genres (shooters in shooter ect). After the contest was officially over (march 8th). However this was just word of mouth and I don’t know if the actually plan on doing this.
On another note; Kong does NOT need us at all really. In fact a lot of flash devs think Kong should be nicer to new games. So even though our games fuel Kong, the already have tons and TONS of games and as such are only really looking for the awesome gems out there.
They’ve already done it. I thought it a little weird that the Unity games didn’t show up in their proper game category until later, but I guess it was Kongregate’s only way to put them all in one big list.
It has pretty explosions, so suckers for that vote it up I guess. People who actually want to play just instantly leave the page, most of them might not even vote it down.
I’ve spend a bit of time investigating what gets submitted to Kongregate. Quite some non-games are published and a lot of “games” are total junk. Adding Unity into the mix does not change this at all. It might just be that, because the contest stuffed the channel, Unity games get some extra bashing, but I expect this to fade.
Is it anymore low key than there usual contests. They have weekly and monthly contests which is posted on the front page (in a small little box and the only mention the winners in a newsletter when someone wins). Unit had a big front page story and a whole section dedicated to it. Though I dont know why they delayed announcing the winners.
I got a decent response for Flood Gates for all of two days, before it vanished into oblivion. The puzzle section gets a whole new page of entries daily, so it goes away faster too. And I agree on their contests being very low-key (Wasn’t aware Kongregate ran contests at all before the Unity announcements).
Because of that, it seems to be very, very hard to get traction using the Kongregate site alone. Still, the contest was a good incentive to test the waters.
I saw a few of the games on the front page under hot new games, but that was about it. Anyway, the point of the contest was to win $10,000, so as long as they actually give that money to the winner (which I’m sure they will), I don’t really see how it could be considered a flop.
There were a couple of reasons why I didn’t enter.
Firstly I figured that there are probably (usually) developers out there who already have put tonnes of hours into a game and think to themselves hey, I can release it to this competition and make a bunch of money easily, with which I wouldn’t be able to compete when trying to start a game from scratch.
Secondly I figured there just isn’t enough time (like 1 or 2 months was it?) to make a decent game, especially since I hardly have any spare time as it is and there are probably people out there who can devote their full-time attention to it.
So that sort of made it pointless for me. But I’m sure that didn’t deter the folks who did decide to enter.
Obviously due to the low penetration and some weird attitude of the Kongregate/Flash community/players themselves. Seems many of them expect to see every single game to be using full 3d features of unity (all kind of shades, good looking graphics etc.) to even consider the game to be any good. Most of them just down rate a unity game with 1 star, just because it doesn’t look like an AAA title “doesn’t utilize 3D features of unity”.
Which is kind of a weird attitude, considering they play shitting Flash games which looks even worse and don’t moan about it that it’s “not 3d”.
Agree with that. At least 2 or 3 of the games from the 10 winners where games, who were in a playable state 8-9 months. So that contest flopped indeed. Imho the point should have been to get new developers into unity to make more games and hence increase the popularity of Unity and not to award people who already got finished games they could submit for some extra free bucks…
I think it was kind of a flop too because… it could have done alot more for the Unity community. It was only like a month and a half?! That is essentially a ‘speed development’ competition, and resulted in kongregate being spammed with a TON of either really shitty, unfinished and beta projects which just makes Unity look terrible. Like 70% of the Unity content that got posted to the Kongregate during that time I feel should not have been posted at all. This is not to say I think everyones work is bad, quite the contrary, I was amazed by some of the submissions on kongregate, even the beta projects, but the mass majority of the submissions were beta and should not be made public. Even the best entres on there, and even the winning games, seemed to me like they all could of used a bit more development time to polish them. Whoever decided on that deadline for submissions I don’t think thought about what they were doing at all. I can only think of one unity game on kongregate that feels thoroughly finished, polished, and done, on par with the best flash games on kongregate, and that is the Interstellar Marines sharpshooter game. Not to say I think that one is the best, but it is definanetly the most finished feeling.
I fear Unity will get a reputation as a really bad engine with poor graphics, and sluggish controls because people have been flooding sites with rushed work. But who knows, Flash once had that reputation, flash portals like 6 years ago were flooded with horrendous content.
I think the real aim of the contest from Kongregate’s point of view was a way of publically announcing that they would now be taking Unity submissions, to get some interest from anyone developing with Unity and to increase the installation base of the plugin amongst their user. From these aims, it probably did what they wanted it to. I’m a little confused with how they handled the results of the contest, they seemed to be just tucked away in a ‘if you remember the link to the page’ part of the site. This may or may not have something to do with the big Portal 2 ad campaign they started about the same time as the results where due, but it was very anti-climactic.
As other people have pointed out, there where a lot of games that where… well… not really games (more like Beta/Alpha tests of ideas). This is a real shame and does reflect badly on Unity, especially to people new to the plugin like many Kongregate users will be. It’s great to see people enthusiastic about getting something they’ve made out there to the public, but its like showing someone a $5000 wedding cake they’ve just bought when all you’ve done is grease some baking tins and made the little people to go on top - even if they can see how its going to turn out, they aren’t going to be overly impressed.
Again as other people have pointed out, the games that did best where ones that where already well under way when the contest hit, or had been finished a long time ago. This is probably just an oversight from Kongregate as to how long a reasonable amount of time to create a Unity game in comparison to a Flash game of similar quality. In the end this did put quite a lot of developers off entering, and contributed to the Alpha/Beta quality of some entries.
Flop or not, It will be interesting to see how Unity games as a whole do on Kongregate, and having another outlet for developers can only be a good thing… right?
I think one awesome title to define Unity as a real game engine is all that will be needed. For all of our sakes I hope Interstellar Marines is really awesome, because thats the closest a game has come to proving Unity as a genuine FPS tool.
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