The Great Canadian Appathon [4] awarded $35,000 to student game developers after its Grand Finale occurred yesterday. The Appathon itself happened on January 19th, when over 500 college and university students competed to design the next hit mobile game in just 48 hours.
Now the winners have been crowned, and ‘Team Friend Boat’, who created the game ‘Size Matters‘ took home the grand prize of $25,000. The top three submissions showed off their creations to a panel of judges yesterday. They were selected from over 100 submissions.
“Bringing in art schools through the custom matchmaking system on the GCA website really took the quality of submission to a whole new level,” said XMG Studio Inc. Founder Ray Sharma. “The games were more polished and much closer to being market-ready than we would’ve expected and we’re excited to work with the teams to launch them in an App Store.”
Tony Clement, President of the Treasury Board and Minister for the Federal Economic Initiative for Northern Ontario, announced the winners and awarded the prizes.
The other prize winners were as follows:
- $5,000 for second place team Cool Beans for their game ‘Kingdom Crushers’
- $1,000 for third place team Last Minute for their game ‘Wildfire’
- $1,000 for winners in the categories: Best Art/Aesthetics, Team SuperSymmetry with ‘Dragon Drop’ Most Technically Challenging, Team Solo Penguin with ‘Reddawn Return to Fishland’ Best Original/Experimental Application, Schrödingers Team with ‘Quest’
- $1,000 GCA4 Fan Favourite as determined by an open voting on the GCA website, Team Ninja Cornz with ‘Princess Runner’
- $1,000 GCA4 Champion of Hearts, honouring the extraordinary effort of Professor Lynda Hausman and Professor Umer Noor from the Humber College Faculty in making the GCA4 and unforgettable event for their students
- 60 VIP tickets to participate in Canada’s first national Open Data hackathon – the Canadian Open Data Experience (CODE). These tickets will give the top 15 GCA4 teams access to the invite-only CODE hacker-hub in Toronto and includes travel and accommodation
