Congrats to Thane Brimhall and Matthew Krohn for taking home a prize for Polymorphable! That crucial "second game" made with the Flare engine really helped the engine flex, grow, and ultimately mature.

A quick congrats message on the Flare blog: http://flarerpg.org/blog/20130218

Congrats to all, guess its best to use an existing code base (nice excuse to continue the same project next year). Do we get to see scores like in art part?

Congratulations to the winners! They have made some great games with the resources, time and tools they had available. Free game development is not easy, but with the work and effort that has been put into this competition from everyone, there are much more art and many more and improved tools available, and artists and game developers have gotten experience from participating in the contest (I know I have definitely learned a lot from participating). I hope there will come a future LPC competition, and if so, I will look forward to it.

Thanks to those who played and reviewed my game!

Congrats to all the winners and participants!  I'm a bit disappointed that I didn't push myself to enter the coding phase, despite the fact that I entered the art phase (and received a surprisingly respectable score, for that matter!).

I had some thoughts about the structure of the next one that would help motivate me and hopefully others.  Regardless of the style chosen, I think we'd all benefit from having at least some part of the contests running concurrently, and in a gated manner.  Something like:

Month 1: initial art phase
Month 2: initial gamedev phase (must submit demo), final art phase (artists take requests/fill in gaps as appropriate)
Month 3: final gamedev phase

This schedule would still allow people to take part in both.  Obviously you don't want to exclude anyone who wants to enter at the last minute, but you could restrict a subset of the prizes to those who meet the first deadlines, or perhaps offer smaller, separate prizes at that level (though that increases schedule pressure on the judges, which may be an issue).

As for the style question, I think FLARE-style isometric renders of 3D models would make for some fantastic-looking contest games. Or use the same perspective and go for a particular theme (like steampunk, say, as opposed to the implied fantasy theme from last year), so that we can reuse many of the wonderful assets created for the first contest.

I'm curious what the prizes were for the winners?  Did they get cash like the art side of the competition?  or did everybody code these games simply to make more open-source games available?

I wasn't around at the time this competition was going on, but I'd love to see another LPC in the future!  If that happens and a Java developer is looking for an existing code base to improve on, I'd suggest taking a look at "Dusk".  There's a link to my blog about this old game at my profile <---.  Peace

@Bart: Please make an announcement over at FreeGamer too.

Congrats to everyone! So many great entries.