Java 4K Game Programming Contest

The Java 4K Game Programming Contest, also known as Java 4K and J4K, is an informal contest that was started by the Java Game Programming community to challenge their software development abilities.

The Java 4K Game Programming Contest, also known as Java 4K and J4K, is an informal contest that was started by the Java Game Programming community to challenge their software development abilities. The competition was hosted on a new website, Java4k.com. Games from previous years can also be found on the new website. Before the launch of the contest, woogley had announced his withdrawal from arranging contest. The task of administrating the contest and hosting the site was therefore taken over by Arni Arent (appel) and Joakim Johnsson (jojoh). Just like previous years, there was also a dedicated forum at Java-Gaming.org. The games were then thoroughly reviewed by five judges; Arni Arent, Joakim Johnsson, Kevin Glass, Matt Hicks and Chris Melissinos. They reviewed each game in three categories; Overall, Technical and Presentation. The results were announced on March 28, 2008. Year 7 (2009) Year 7 launched in December 2008 and lasted until February 28, 2009 (extended from an original closing date of January 31). The number of games submitted returned to previous levels, with 67. This year introduced a requirement (later relaxed, but still followed by most games) to use JNLP deployment, and as a result had a mix of applications and applets. Other technical first for this year were the submission of word games and a game which used the microphone. Word Twister used built-in levels, and Scr4mble used reflection to grab class names from the J2SE API and split them into words to build a dictionary. Frequent Flier was controlled by the pitch sung into the mic. The games were reviewed by five judges: Arni Arent, Chris Melissinos, Matt Hicks, Eli Delventhal, and Mark DeLoura. As previously, they reviewed in the three categories of Overall, Technical, and Presentation. There was minor controversy over the scoring because some judges were unable to play some games. Their scores for those games were initially 0 and counted against those games when the scores were first released on April 1, but the averages were changed to discount these 0 scores three hours later. Year 8 (2010) to Year 12 (2014) Following problems with Webstart in 2009, the 2010 and later contests were applets-only, but it did introduce the option of using pack200 compression. Since 2010, judges gave only an overall score, which was normalised before averaging. There was also a separate community voting system where each voter had 50 points (25 before 2013) to allocate between the games, with a limit of 5 points to any game. Since 2013, there is the option for voters to add a short sentence for feedback.

External links

Web Archive of the Original Thread - Actual thread was deleted by Sun during a regular system purge Incomplete list of first year entries - Saved by Archive.org Year 2 Thread - On Sun's Java Forums Java Unlimited - The repository for submitted games since 2005. 4K Game Design Tricks - A Wiki article to assist new entrants. 4K Tips and Sources - A set of tips, tutorials and game source codes for 4K Java participants JavaGaming.org Contest Forums - Each year (starting with year 3) has its own sub-forum. Why are 4K Games so much fun to write and Play? Should there be Java game competitions without size limits?

References

Text derived from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1376594489 under CC BY-SA 4.0; modifications have been made.