Hello, everyone!
This time it is officially the end of the Icehouse Jam 2019!
As you now know, we had a lot of fun organizing it and monitoring your progress during the 3 weeks of creation. Following this, the public votes designated 3 winners, namely Seclusion, Eoin's Quest and Ikarus. It remained to be seen who would emerge as the winners, following the jury's votes. Icehouse judges had nominated 10 games, which were kept for the final votes. External judges then scored these games according to the 5 defined criteria.
Before publishing the results, if you are not in too much of a hurry, let's take 2 minutes to thank the external judges who have agreed to participate with us. For all of us (the Icehouse collective and the Jam participants) it was a chance and an honour to be able to have them. These external judges are people who are active on the independent gaming scene and no longer have to demonstrate their talent. They are not related to the Icehouse collective and rated your games in a total independency. The judges all had very different tastes as gamers, and some of them have enjoyed some games that others didn't like as much. But don't forget that being able to present your games and demos to these creators, and then discover the ranking they have established, is an excellent way for everyone to progress and discover their strengths and weaknesses.
We would therefore like to remind you of the list of external judges and invite you to discover their work on their respective sites. The following studios/creators participated in the external votes:
- Cécile and Olivier from Atelier Sentô, illustrators, comics book authors inspired by traditional Japan, and developers of The Coral Cave (http://www.ateliersento.com)
- Nico and Geoffroy from nova-box, who have already released 2 beautiful Visual Novels called Along the Edge and Seer's Isle (http://www.nova-box.com)
- Jan Kavan, from CBE Software, who has released the very good J.U.L.I.A. game in the past and is about to release Someday You'll Return, an impressive Unreal Engine game (http://cbe-software.com)
- Aaron Gwynaire, from DefyRealityEntertainment, passionate musician and creator, big fan of Myst and its sequel Riven, who is actively working on his game Neyyah (https://www.facebook.com/DefyRealityEntertainment)
Here is finally without any further delay the final ranking of our first Icehouse Jam!
1 Ikarus
2 The Heart's Fallacy
3 Seclusion
4 Valhalla
5 The Greek Escape
6 Bright Origin
6 Road to Aztlan
8 Queen of the Underworld
9 Growing Up
10 HOL†WUDU
11 The Secret of the Mirow Castle
The Judges have tried to appreciate each of your games for their true value. And the fact that you are at the bottom of the ranking does not mean that you have no merit, quite the contrary! The judges told us that they enjoyed playing your games (all of them).
Not very surprisingly, just like in the public votes, we find Ikarus and Seclusion in the top three. The little surprise is the arrival of The Heart's Fallacy, which had already seduced us at The Icehouse. Of course, you could regret that a certain game is not better placed, and you could disagree with the Judges, but all projects had qualities. The final ranking is based on the total of the Judges' scores, and the individual rankings per Judge is quite different! Some Judges didn't have the 3 winners in their top 3 and would have chosen other games. Valhalla was very well done and could have won, so we hope that the project will continue. The Greek Escape has suffered from minor issues but had a very good potential.... Every game deserved to win! But hey, there could only be three winners. Congratulations to Ikarus, the big winner of this Icehouse Jam 2019, to The Heart's Fallacy who receives the silver medal, and to Seclusion for its bronze medal!
Honorary Prizes
In addition, the judges had to choose 2 games to give them a special mention. Unlike the votes of the 3 big winners above, they could name any game created during the Jam. We are delighted to learn that Eoin's Quest received the most votes, closely followed by Don't Eat the Girl. These two games therefore receive the 2019 Honorary Prizes! Congrats to their creators!
Winners of the Honorary Prizes:
- Eoin's Quest
- Don't Eat the Girl
The two winners of these Honorary Prizes were out of competition for the main Prizes, as they were created by teams including one or several members of our collective. We happily accept the Judges' decision here, but necessarily we cannot accept the rewards that were planned in this category. Therefore, we will offer these rewards to the other participants of the Game Jam. Thus each of the above 11 nominees will receive a small honorary reward soon.
A next message will come back more precisely on the judges' opinions, with some more detailed comments on some of your games. We need some time to sort it out, but the judges have taken notes during the voting process and we will be happy to share some of these notes with you if it can help you as creators. In this same message, we will summarize the different Prizes, and we will tell you how to contact us to receive them, including the honorary rewards. The 3 main winners (the creators of Ikarus, The Heart's Fallacy and Seclusion) are invited to write us already by email at contact.theicehouse gmail for the congratulations and the upcoming awards ceremony. This will take place around Christmas.
Please keep an eye on your messages for the last stage of our Jam, congratulations to all of you, and don't forget to follow us! All the links, projects and information of our collective are on www.theicehouse.fr Anyone can join at any time on Discord too.
See you soon!
- The Jam organizers