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  • Trace Racer Takes Top Prize In Great Canadian Appathon

7th November 2011

Trace Racer Takes Top Prize In Great Canadian Appathon

Great Canadian Appathon 2Over the weekend of September 30th, more than 400 college and university students competed in the Great Canadian Appathon2, creating  a mobile game in under 48 hours. At the KPMG- sponsored Grand Finale on November 2nd, the top three teams showed off their games before a panel of judges.

Montreal team “Drop Table”, who created the game “Trace Racer” took home the top prize of $25,000 and four Unity Pro 3.x licenses. Game Trace Racer is a Windows Phone 7 racing game where the player uses their finger to trace terrain on their device’s touch screen. The “Drop Table” team hail from Concordia University, and all but Mr. Dinulescu, who studies computer science, are in their first year of software engineering. Team members were Alexander Coco, Dragos Dinulescu, Thomas Rahn and David Siekut.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XijHRQgw_4s]

Presented by XMG Studio and the National Post, the Great Canadian Appathon2 also awarded $10,000 to second place team “Resistor 5” for their game “Ludicrous Archery”, an archery game also for Windows Phone 7 platform that is apparently ‘ludicrous.’ Team members Mike Darwish, Mike Hoffman and Stephane Beniak are all in their fourth year of engineering at McGill University.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vKG_gaLfPI]

A further roster of 10 teams were each awarded $1,000 for a variety of category prizes including “Best Windows Phone 7 Game” sponsored by Microsoft, “Best Technical Game Play” sponsored by Telus and “Best Power & Performance Game” sponsored by NOS Energy Drinks.

The winning games were evaluated on criteria such as the degree of innovation, the fun and entertainment factor, the level of art and design polish, as well as stability. The game design theme for this competition was sports.

At the final round last week, each of the top three teams presented their game to the judging panel before a live audience. After conferring, the judges announced the winners and awarded the $50,000 in cash and prizes.

The game development team from XMG Studio will work with all of the finalists to polish their games and publish them in the appropriate App Store. The four team members of “Drop Table” will also be invited for job interviews at the XMG office in Toronto.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Yb2uPaX4mU]

This entry was posted on Monday, November 7th, 2011 at 8:03 am and is filed under Awards, Contests, Game Dev, National News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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