SIGGRAPH 2009 Announces Winners in GameJam Competition

Organizers of the SIGGRAPH 2009 conference have announced the winners in its first annual GameJam! design competition, which saw entries from students hailing from Woodbury University and Ringling College of Art and Design. The event's Best of Show prize went to Laurissa Hughes, Chance Dodd, and Melissa Guldbrand for Falling for SIGGRAPH, an action title in which players must use geometric shapes to bounce a falling character to safety. Dan Bodenstein and Kelsey Olsen, along with Woodbury University students Carlos D'Hazas, Watcharin Jariyasukdipony, and Luis Salazar, earned the Crowd Favorite award for Invasion of Zaltor. A second Crowd Favorite award was awarded to Network, a title created by Michael Molinari, Jonathan Holt, Andrew Walton from Ringling College of Art and Design. All games were created over a 24-hour period using the Panda3D Flash game engine. The winning entries are playable at SIGGRAPH's website. "With this year's expanded focus on gaming, we were excited to create a sister competition to [SIGGRAPH 3D animation competition] FJORG! in GameJam!," said Tina Ziemek, GameJam! 2009 Chair from the University of Utah. "Games and game development have been a driving force in pushing the state of the art in real-time computer graphics technology," Ziemek continues, "and our participants were able to create quality games in the short time allotted. All of them did extremely well, and we expect this will be the first of many more gaming competitions to come."