In 2012 we had another fine list of competing teams – this was after the big studio crash of 2011 and we found that we had to introduce a new league to cater for teams which we could no longer define as ‘indie’ or emerging but who were not quite in the pro-league. Enter the ‘start up’ league. That crash was pretty horrible but it did much to engender the shape of local game making that we see today: a rich ecosystem of studios. We had 11 indie league teams, 3 ‘start up’ teams and 3 pro-league teams. Local heroes, Halfbrick, came on board as sponsors.

2012 was also the year we started the Game On symposium – GO423 – and the year our original server got rather badly infected with multiple virii … sadly a lot of the posts and details have been lost

Duncan (Halfbrick Studios at the time) provided us with the 3 words

Spring – Light – Monster

We had a lovely new logo

We had an awesome judge team

There were Noodles

We had ducks – apparently considered a necessity by Studio Blimp

We had our youngest team ever because Giselle (of Global Game Jam fame) brought her two children along and they made a game with their dad!

And a rather divine documentary of the challenge made by Iain Anderson

For Science won in the pro-league, Team carrot won the indie league Overall Winner and People’s Choice.  Ghost Box won the Start up league, Well Placed Cactus took Best Audio, Team Carrot won Best Graphics and Black Wolf won the very coveted Who Dares Wins prize!

The ever awesome Zed Games did an interview which you can still enjoy zgepisode138

Keith Novak came back to take photos – some lovely panoramas happended

We took nice photos of all the teams

And – of course – the usual selection of ad hoc photos happened