March 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

Beranek, developer of Tales of Nebezem: Elemental Link Part 2: I would like to thank Kongregate, especially Greg, and of course all my players. If anyone likes the lore in the Nebezem games, there's a wiki site –- not fully completed, but it already contains a lot of information about the games, characters, nations, etc.: https://nebezem.fandom.com

• Second-Place Winner

Tenfor, developer of The Dark One: Hey there Kongregaters!

Firstly I'd like to thank everyone who played and special thanks for all the feedback you gave me; as a beginner game developer they are super helpful for me! :) And I also owe a big thanks to the Kongregate team for this amazing opportunity!

I love creating games but "The Dark One" was my favourite project so far, and I enjoyed every moment of the process. RPG was always my favourite genre when I started making the fist Landor Quest; it was my goal to develop an RPG, but unfortunately my programming skills weren't good enough for a complex game. That's why I chose to go with that card system. With The Dark One I could evolve the battle mechanics a little, and add a little more RPG/open world concept to it. I already started working on the next game, and I'll do my best to meet the expectations. My goals this time are to make it much longer, add 3 playable characters: a wizard (Tyren), a fighter (Landor), and an assassin (someone new), add a skill tree system, add much more upgrades, relics, locations, side quests and secrets, and make it mobile friendly. I hope you will like it. I can't wait to launch it on Kongregate!

Thank you for playing!

May the wisdom guide you! :)

• Third-Place Winner

Ferociter, developer of Temple of the Four Serpents: Hi! First of all, to be honest, I’m still mentally processing the very positive response the game has gotten. Thank you to everyone who played my game!

This game has been in development for quite some time, mostly because I would occasionally put it on hold, as I was also busy studying. While of course I was hoping people would play the game when I would release it, I really wasn’t sure how it would perform. Would it be too difficult? Are the puzzles clear enough, but not too obvious? It seems to have turned out alright, which is a huge relief. Some people have even replayed it to get a better time, which is fantastic!

You could say I was “testing the waters” with this release. During development I got ideas for similar games, although with wildly different puzzle mechanics and environments. After this success, I’ve decided that there is definitely more to come, but I will first focus on some other, completely different games, which are most certainly going to be released on Kongregate. The focus of future games, which are loosely connected to Temple of the Four Serpents, will likely shift a lot more towards exploration, and a bit more towards puzzles, while still maintaining skill-based challenges.

In the end I just started making something that I would enjoy playing myself. It turned out to also be a tremendous amount of fun to make, so the fact that it has been received so well is incredibly encouraging. As for tips for other developers, I’d encourage you to create something you enjoy playing yourself as well. I find it way easier to stay motivated on a project I’m passionate about. Also, getting feedback during all stages of development is very important. Let the people around you play your games, and pay very close attention to how they play it and what kind of feedback they might have.

• Fourth-Place Winner

Tetronomics, developer of Idle Harvest: Wow! What a month this has been for us. We are so honored that the Kongregate community has made Idle Harvest the 4th best game of March. We have been working on Idle Harvest for a long time now, so to see our work be received so positively is incredible!

We are a small team of developers who are new to making idle games (though we all share a passion for the genre). We have learned a lot through development, but our biggest lesson is that the best design came from many hours of iteration. Whenever we feel discouraged, we pull up a build from each month we were in development and are in awe of how many changes it took to get the game to where it is today.

We have huge ambitions for Idle Harvest -- we have already released our first content patch, and we are currently building our next one. We are so thankful for the feedback all of you have contributed towards making our game better, and we are very excited for the journey ahead as we keep building. Publishing our project onto Kongregate has given us new energy for the game, as we now feel we are making a game not just for you, but with you!

We cannot thank you enough for the support thus far, and we are thrilled for what the future holds for Idle Harvest._

• Fifth-Place Winner

TadasGloom, developer of Life in the Static: I came up with the game mechanics for Life in the Static way back in 2016, when my brother and I were talking about ideas for a game consisting only of squares. My initial idea was to make a game where you stop time and square enemies become platforms and thus you can constantly change the game field. Obviously it was never made into a fully fleshed out game; all I had was a tiny demo. Throughout the years I would come back to that demo, but never really started working on it seriously. Until few days ago, when I had an urge to mentally go back to my early development days and make something really small. I took my old demo (originally titled Life in the Clouds, by the way), rewrote some of the code, added simple graphics and voila.

It took me around 10 days to make it, and I am happy with what I came up with in this short period of time. I know if I took more time I could come up with something much more polished. But it is what it is.

Congrats to the rest of the winners below!