You Could Have Won $2,500 If You Were Better Than These Guys

The good thing about the second annual Bay Area Game Jam‘s make-a-game-in-4824-hours contest is you get free games the day after the contest ends.

The grand prize of $2,500 went to Daniel Bryner, Bradley Johnson and Chris Webb who managed to create Lava Ball on Wild Pocket’s new 3D engine. How they did this with only so much coffee and cookies available at the event is nothing short of gross admirable dedication.

Lava Ball has players rolling a metal ball using W, A, S, D keys to move across bouncing platforms that rocket your ball over a pit of lava. It’s actually pretty addictive, if you can get Wild Pocket’s site to stop eating your browser long enough to try it.

The other two entries that scored prizes didn’t seem to have it as together as Lava Ball, which is probably why they didn’t win the grand prize. Save the Boy is a Boom Blox-ish clone that has spiffy music and fugly character models while Bumper Bash! has the most annoying music ever and the simplest gameplay.

And if just now you’re thinking “Wow, some of the winning games look like crap,” I’d like to see you do better in 48 24 hours. No, seriously, I would.

Check ’em out, if you dare. Fair warning that the game hosting site doesn’t seem to like Firefox.

My bad, the whole event is 48 hours, the duration for coding your game is 24.