Kongregate News

Our contest page has been updated for our contests running through March. Keep rating February's games, though. We'll still be accepting user ratings through March 4, and the winners will be announced shortly after. You can view the current leaders here. Like a game that was uploaded in February and isn't on there? Make sure you've rated it!

We do our best to prepare for uberness, but sometimes a game has more uberness than we can handle, as was the case with last week's Uber Breakout II, which was declared the winner by user ratings for the $250 prize. Letter Boxed placed second for a $150 runner-up prize, making it the very first Shockwave game to receive a check from Kongregate. And in what was a virtual three-way tie for third place, Wreckanoid was declared the second runner-up by a margin literally smaller than a single rating. So if you wanted Snake Classic or Ball Revamped 3: Gemini to win something last week and you didn't rate them... well... you blew it, man.

Even in Kongregate's earliest days, with limited ways to acquire points, TrueDarkness was the first user last night to hit our level cap of 20. And not a single level came unearned; he participated a lot in our early closed alpha, provided lots of valuable feedback, uploaded a bunch of great games, gave us a referral link on his website, invited friends, and invited developers who leveled up with games of their own, earning TrueDarkness even more points. Oh, and he rated every single game on the entire site.

Some may also remember that TrueDarkness was our very first featured developer on the community page.

So congratulations, and we promise we'll have something you can do with all those points soon! Oh, and unlike Guild Wars, we probably will be raising the level cap above 20.

You can also see some other high-level users on our leaderboard.

The intense Boxhead: More Rooms won last week's $250 contest with the highest user ratings Kongregate has seen since Bowmaster Prelude. The "this is way harder than it looks" puzzle game FruitFall was a runner-up for $150, along with Red Ball, a game that provides entertainment and painful frustration in equally high amounts.

Some really great honorable mentions last week include Four Second Firestorm, Mezzo: Winter Edition, Pinboliada and Presents Panic.

With Kongregate's update earlier today, we now support Shockwave games in addition to Flash! Shockwave games are fully eligible for our current contests, and will also be eligible for ad revenue share in the near future.

We also made a few other tweaks to the upload process for developers; games can now be viewed in a preview state before being uploaded, and developers can manually set the width and height of their games if something doesn't quite work out with Kongregate's automatic process of reading them.

What a week! We had some major competition from February 3 to February 9, and three prizes didn't seem like nearly enough for all the great games uploaded onto the site. But Dice Mogul was crowned the best of the best by user ratings last week for the $250 prize, showing us all just how a Monopoly-style game can be fun without requiring 15 hours to finish. The frantic minigames of Four Second Frenzy took home a $150 runner-up prize (and don't forget, our minigame contest is starting soon!) along with Alpha Force, a stylish, old-fashioned flight shooter.

Some terrific honorable mentions include Snowman Attack, GunMaster Onslaught 2.0, Mani Golf, UFOMania and Vorticube. Note that these games (as well as the weekly winners) are still eligible for our monthly contest.

Putting an end to the incredible suspense, we're pleased to announce the official contest winners of the Kongregate Game Contest 1.

Winner: Bowmaster Prelude (Dragon Gamez)
2nd: Chaos Faction (JorjEade)
3rd: 3D Logic (AlexMatveev)
4th: McDonald's Videogame (molleindustria)
5th: Orbox (Arseniy)
6th: Seven Deadly Sins (JorjEade)
7th: Unreal Flash 1 (cicla)
8th: Warp Forest (Arseniy)
9th: Ball Revamped 4 (jmtb02)

Jason Reinsvold is therefore the winner of the $1,500 prize, with $1,000 for second place, $700 for third, $500 for fourth, and $250 each for fifth through ninth.

But wait! We also have weekly winners too! 3D Logic won last week's $250 prize, with the two $150 runner-up spots filled by Hewitt and Unreal Flash 1. While Hewitt was ineligible for the Kongregate Game Contest 1, it's currently in the lead for our next round of contests running through February.

"Oh yeah? And what are you going to do about it?" should now be a phrase of the past, as today's update displays who in chat is a moderator (with an "M") as well as who's a Kongregate employee ("K"). We've made a few other improvements to the site as well. In addition to numerous bug fixes, chat will no longer force you to the bottom if you're scrolling through history while people are talking, and the forums now have a "reply" button at the bottom of threads.

After realizing that we overestimated how long it would take most games to get 30 ratings, we've decided to shorten the voting cut-off period for our main contest to tomorrow, February 3. Developers will therefore not have to wait as long to find out the official results. This also means that today and tomorrow is the last chance to rate games on the site to determine the winners of the Kongregate Game Contest 1.

Note that games need a minimum of 30 votes to qualify, so we encourage users to take a look at our latest games and rate the ones that were uploaded during January and have fewer than 30 ratings.

Our newest contests begin today, officially renewing our weekly contests and starting a new monthly one. The prizes are just as big this time around, but they're compacted into a shorter time frame. Check out our updated contest page for details.

We'll be announcing the official winners to our last contest soon, but it's not too late to vote!

We broke some records on Kongregate last week when a whooping 25 new games were uploaded onto the site, many of them surprisingly good. Draw-Play received the highest user rating and took home the $250 prize, however, with Catacombs and Arrival in Hell coming in as runners-up, winning $150 each. There were plenty of games close behind in the ratings as well, such as WetDike, Rapid Reaction Master, Scribble 2!, and the Kongregate office favorite Dog Eat Dog.

At last, we've added a search bar to the site's top navigation area. We heard searching for things is popular with "world wide web sites" these days, so we thought we'd try it out.

And next to our search area is a new link directly to our forums. Apparently just having the old link from the community section was like asking our users to meet with a shadowy informant in an abandoned parking garage for ambiguous clues about who might have information regarding the whereabouts of Kongregate's forums.

We've also improved the functionality of viewing people's profiles from chat. Chat profiles will now display friends, uploaded games, and favorites. There's also now an option to mute chat at the top of the chat window.

We're currently hiring a UI designer/project manager on Kongregate, so check out the above link for more information.

Kongregate also got an update earlier today that allows users to share games on Digg, Facebook, del.icio.us and StumbleUpon. So try it out, share your favorite games with friends, and let us know how it works out!

There are definitely more than seven sins that bring about immense joy, but the fun of committing a few of them in Seven Deadly Sins was enough for it to win last week's $250 contest. The platforming adventures of Cereus Peashy also won the hearts of those who felt Clubby The Seal was too easy, earning it a $150 runner-up prize alongside the original BowMaster.

Kongregate made a major new deploy today, with more happiness and features than a barrel of feature-rich puppies. Behold:

Freedom! Anyone can now play any games on Kongregate, even without an account. You'll still need to register to chat, however, which can be done without leaving the game page.

Chat! In response to Kongregate's growing traffic, chat has now be segmented into multiple rooms. You can choose your room from the top of the user list in chat. We've also fixed a bug that caused games to stutter a bit (and the user list to flash) whenever someone joined chat. Check out our forum post for details on how exactly chat segmentation works.

Forums! Improvements have been made to our forums. Posts now take up more space to the right, hitting "enter" twice will now break up paragraphs a bit, and we fixed a bug that was affecting the ability to display custom Warp Forest levels.

One of these days, all the world's castles will finally be defended for good. But that day is not today, fortunately, as the castle-defending awesomeness of Bowmaster Prelude received the highest user rating last week, earning it the $250 prize. The McDonald's Videogame and Rodent Tree Jump claimed the two $150 runner-up prizes, proving that adorable animals are great regardless of what you're doing with them.

Gamma Bros. has been selected as a finalist in the web games category of the 9th annual Independent Games Festival. We love Gamma Bros. too; in fact, some might remember that we selected it as the grand prize winner of our very first game contest. We wish Pixeljam Games the best of luck, and anyone planning to attend IGF who wishes to meet up with the amazingly awesome Kongregate staff should fire us an email.

In somewhat related news that isn't even really new anymore, Tri-achnid was selected by Jay is Games as the best platformer of 2006. Don't forget that Edmund McMillen and Florian Himsl are still working hard on the second chapter.

Last night, we deployed a hefty load of new features to Kongregate. Our forums are now live, and a few trusted users have been selected as moderators for chat. We also added the ability for users to mute other users and add them as friends straight from chat, simply by clicking on their name. And if you happen to get disconnected while in chat, you'll now be automatically reconnected.

Ouch, my brain! Well, apparently players on Kongregate are masochists for psychological punishment, as Orbox received the highest user rating last week and won the $250 prize. jmtb02 swept the two $150 runner-up spots, however, with Ball Revamped 4 and Scribble!.

Last week's contest ended with Chaos Faction obtaining the highest user rating on Kongregate, thus securing the $250 prize. The two runner-up games, Warp Forest and Blockhead: The Game, also received respectable scores, taking home a $150 prize each.