The Gamma4 finalists can be found here: http://www.kokoromi.org/announcements/487/

I saw this morning that the IGF winners have been announced. Monaco ended up taking the grand prize and excellence in design. I was eager to play this before, now I really want to check it out. You can read about the rest of the winners here.

Here’s a brain rot teaser:

I’ve been working on an entry for Kokoromi’s Gamma IV competition. This year’s challenge is to make a one-button game. All of the games input must only use one-button (menus, gameplay, etc). Their focus is always on experimentation and creative design. So while you can remake pretty much any game to work with just one button, I’m sure they’ll be looking for the most creative use of the constraint.

My entry for the competition has been a collaboration with my friend Kiril, who is an extremely talented artist. So I’ve been coding up the game and he’s been making it look good. I’m excited to see how the finished project ends up. There are still some game play decisions up in the air, but I’m confident we’re going to have a strong showing. If things go well, the game will be released at GDC during Kokoromi’s Gamma party. Wish us luck!

Development has continued on 10bestthings.com since it’s launch and the site is coming along nicely. I built the prototype and beta version of a community music album project for Tommy Lee, which can be found here. I did the rapid development of the software and it has since been passed on to a group who manages the code full time. That was a fun project and I’m glad I got to work with the guys over at Retronyms.

That project allowed me (or should I say forced me…) to dig way deep into Zend Framework’s decorator classes in order to get our forms looking the way the designer mocked them up. The Zend_Form class is really nice from a code standpoint as it really takes a lot of the tedium out of the process. But the trade off definitely comes when you need to implement a heavily styled look & feel to it. However once you get a feel for how it all works, and build some custom elements to suit your needs, it all comes together nicely.

Besides those two projects, I also jumped back onto the development team for Jakprints.com and IndieMerchStore.com – which is exciting, as I helped create the original code for Indie many years ago. It’s great working with my old friend Mike Hickey again, along with the rest of the Sprokets guys/gals. If you ever need anything printed (business cards, postcards, t-shirts, stickers… pretty much anything) I highly recommend checking out Jakprints. They do excellent work, have quick turn-around, and are very eco-friendly (rad dudes too).

Here’s one of my recent lists: Essential Firefox Addons

This was a great project and collaborating with other talented Sprokets developers (Mike Barone, Vince Frantz, Dan Ott, John-Paul Walton, Brad Colbow) is always a great experience.