July 2019 Contest Winners

Each month, developers win cash prizes for having the highest-rated new games! Click here for official rules. Check out the official contest page here.

We reached out to the top 5 winners to ask about their inspirations and experiences developing last month's top games on Kongregate!

• First-Place Winner

VasantJ, developer of Medieval Chronicles 5: Well, this is it. I think I finally managed to mentally destroy the audience by presenting them with the unholy spawn of Hell that even the Devil doesn't want anything to do with. This game was actually supposed to be Wolf's Bane 2 with the paradox setting and Ada acting as the undercover cop. But when I thought of a crossdressing Dregg and the chance to declare him pregnant, I made it into the game as you see now. I am pretty sure God is looking at me with concerns about my mental health.

As for the complaints I got about not having a debate at the end, I wanted the impact of Dregg's revelation so powerful that the culprit lost his state of mind to realize what was happening. But nonetheless, thanks for the overwhelming support this game got, especially after the trainwreck that was Demented Shadows. I am still working on the 3D elements, but I now understand I need more practice before I actually put out a 3D game again. Thanks again for the wonderful support for the series so far, and look forward to Medieval Cop 9 -- Part 2, where we will learn why Dregg hates the Post Office.

• Third-Place Winner

Ferociter, developer of Amidst the Sky: Hello! Let me start with a big thank you to everyone who has played the game. Releasing a game on Kongregate was once again a blast.

A different version of this game was actually finished three years ago. However, when I let others play it I found out that they did not like it at all. The biggest flaw of the original version was that the gameplay just wasn’t... very good. Mostly because the controls felt very sluggish. This showed me why letting other people play it early on is so important.

Anyway, when I came back to it much later I drastically changed the gameplay, which also meant that all the levels were to be redesigned. No problem, that’s the fun part. I also added the Stasis and Switch mechanics to change it up a little bit, and added the time trials along with a second ending to play around with Kongregate’s leaderboard system. Oh, and actual checkpoints aside from doors, the first version may have gone a bit overboard with the difficulty. Having learned my lesson, development this time included much feedback from others. Despite having to basically develop Amidst the Sky twice, I’m very happy with the final result.

I have some vague ideas for a direct sequel. This potential sequel would also elaborate further upon the lore, which so far has been left extremely vague on purpose. There are, however, many other games I want to make as well, such as a worthy successor to Temple of the Four Serpents, so if this does happen it will not be in the near future.

• Fourth-Place Winner

NoaDev, developer of Mini Blocks: Hello guys, I'm on the top again :). This time was the 4th place, so there was an improvement here. For Mini Blocks I took into account some of the feedback more related to technical issues, like support for old browsers and more configuration buttons; I suppose that helped the game to reach a higher score and I'm happy about that. Little by little I'm reaching higher grounds, and a part of that is thanks to the Kongregate platform and its users. Thank you for all!

• Fifth-Place Winner

dabontv, developer of Miner Dash: Hello everyone and thank you for the votes! Miner Dash was inspired by digging games from the past, with a new mechanic for crafting items. We wanted a very easy-to-learn game to get people hooked right away: easy controls, simple concept and a genre people are already familiar with.

The game was developed with Phaser and works well on PC and mobile, simply use keyboard controls on Desktop or touch controls on mobile. Moving forward we plan to develop more games that work on all devices, we find more players are playing web games on mobile and this will allow us to easily port the games to the app store / google play.

We appreciate all of the feedback from the game and plan to release a sequel very soon!

-Dom Bruno "dabontv"
https://lagged.com/

Congrats to the rest of the winners below!