And if I don't have play-testers, take play-testers? :P

Don't worry, I very much recognise the importance and utility of play-testing; I just don't have anyone around here (at least within convenience) that would make a useful play-tester, I fear. I could have posted on the forum, I suppose (I had some degree of playability in place early enough for that, as I recall); I honestly don't recall my reasons for not doing so, but offhand I might have been worried about the amount of time that it can take to get a response on a forum, or might simply have not given it much thought at the pace at which I was working.

hmmm... Is there a trick to getting the unity based games to run on a windows 8.1 machine?

I've tried a couple now Delivery and The Harvest and neither one seems to do anything. I can see the process running in task manager but it just sits there using no resources and seemingly not starting or crashes...

I'm curious about something: why have so many folks have packaged up their games in .rar instead of .zip? Zip functionality is built into Windows and MacOS, and .rar requires a 3rd party app to package/extract. I was playing some of the compo games at a friend's place last night and we passed on the ones that were packaged as .rar since he didn't want to bother downloading winrar or whatever was necessary to extract it.

Is there some advantage I'm not seeing of .rar? It just seems like it's a PITA.

I'd like to chime in on this, i did both rar and zip to compare file sizes from the dump(both under highest settings):
Original folder size: 1.37GB
Compressed rar: 632MB = ~54% compression
Compressed zip: 747MB = ~46% compression

that's a 110mb difference just from zip to rar, and there are better formats then ever rar for compression.

overall i don't get the hostility towards winrar, it takes 2 minutes to install, and after 40 days you simply have to deal with a minor pop up when you open a compressed file in the winrar viewer that takes 2 seconds to close back out(or alternatively purchase a license), otherwise you lose no functionality, and have compress/uncompress functionality embedded into the explorer context menu.

I agree that the people most interested in providing feedback were busy with their own game... Dont you have random family/friends that even remotely play games?

Eh, there are complications on that front right now. I do have some family within walking distance that play games, but likely wouldn't want to take the time off to arrange (after all, I don't know when they'd be in, or when might be inconvenient) and enact that. In all fairness, however, I simply didn't think of it.

Heh. I pestered my friends about a week before the contest, and got them set up to run an XNA build. I'm happy I did, because I discovered that the built in virtual keyboard causes a crash unless you install the full dev suite for XNA. >.< Apparently it's only supposed to be used for testing XBox games, but keyboard input is a pain to implement. Two of the more reliable friends agreed to be available Friday night and they gave me some useful feedback.

I'm curious about something: why have so many folks have packaged up their games in .rar instead of .zip? Zip functionality is built into Windows and MacOS, and .rar requires a 3rd party app to package/extract. I was playing some of the compo games at a friend's place last night and we passed on the ones that were packaged as .rar since he didn't want to bother downloading winrar or whatever was necessary to extract it.

Is there some advantage I'm not seeing of .rar? It just seems like it's a PITA.

I'd like to chime in on this, i did both rar and zip to compare file sizes from the dump(both under highest settings):
Original folder size: 1.37GB
Compressed rar: 632MB = ~54% compression
Compressed zip: 747MB = ~46% compression

that's a 110mb difference just from zip to rar, and there are better formats then ever rar for compression.

overall i don't get the hostility towards winrar, it takes 2 minutes to install, and after 40 days you simply have to deal with a minor pop up when you open a compressed file in the winrar viewer that takes 2 seconds to close back out(or alternatively purchase a license), otherwise you lose no functionality, and have compress/uncompress functionality embedded into the explorer context menu.

What are such formats that are better then rar?

I .rar'd mine because of better compression(23.4MB.rar compared to 32MB.zip). I assumed people would have to be downloading huge packs of the games so wanted to save people on the bandwidth side of things.

@phil_t I uploaded a .zip if you're interested in ReColorMe: https://www.dropbox.com/s/qdbnviovrkxxfbw/ReColorMe.zip

Ah, I didn't realize that .rar has a significantly better compression ratio. Indeed, I tried it on the PC version of my game and the result was 30% of original size vs 37% for .zip.

I just figured most game vehicles already have heavily compressed files. For instance, XNA applies pretty decent compression when you build an install package I think. It looks like the PC builds from Unity are not compressed though.

Soo... When does the competition start? I can't wait to get started with my team of 3!