Congratulations to all the winners!
I want to thank DonationCoder.com for organizing and hosting the contest. If it wasn't for this contest I probably would have never attempted such a project, especially in such a short period of time. I found the whole experience very rewarding.
I'd also like to thank Michelle Hinn and the IGDA's Game Accessibility SIG. I learned a great deal about accessible games during this contest. Designing an accessible game is both challenging and extremely rewarding. Designing Asteroids of Orion to be an accessible game has probably made the game as a whole better than if designed without accessibility in mind. I will be taking Michelle up on the offer to take Asteroids of Orion, and any of my future projects, to a higher level with the help of IGDA's Game Accessibility SIG.
Thank you to the sponsors. I can attest that having such wonderful prizes was a large motivating factor in my participation. I am very pleased with my winnings and plan to make many exciting games with them in the future. The first of which is to be Asteroids of Orion 2!
And to the all the folks on DonationCoder.com forums and #DonationCoder on IRC, I want to thank you for your encouragement and feedback while I worked on the game. It made AoO a better game than it would have been without your contributions.
I also want to thank Garage Games for making Torque Game Builder available through the trial edition. I had never touched TGB before the contest and I had never worked on a 2D game so most of the concepts were foreign to me. However, TGB is so well made that I was able to go from zero to prize winning entry in only three weeks. I was also able to develop the game quickly due to the help of
Torsion from Sickhead Games.
The added benefits of developing in a IDE with debugging probably made me three or four times more productive that I would have been with TGB alone.
Asteroids of Orion benefited greatly from the excellent artwork of
Charles Oines and fellow Donation Coder
Hamradio.
And a great big thank you to James Sterrett. When I became aware of the game contest there was only three weeks to the deadline. I had no idea what to build, but knew I could build something if I had a game concept that I could use. I sent out an email to James and he came back with the whole concept of AoO in less than 24 hours. Without James' contribution AoO would have never been made.
Thank you all and I look forward to the next contest. [hint hint]