Kongregate $25k contest for Unity developers

Kongregate has launched a new competition in a bid to increase the number of Unity-made games on its online games portal.

Unity, the popular multi-platform game development tool, is used by thousands of developers for creating games on a variety of platforms, from PC to Xbox 360 to iPhone, Mac, Android, Wii and PS3.

Kongregate, which has over the years relied on developers making games through Flash, now wants to tap into the growing popularity of the Unity engine. The online portal has launched a competition for Unity-made games, offering $25,000 to the winner and nine other finalists.

The group is seeking original games based on the theme ‘endurance’, and is offering a $10,000 grand prize, $5,000 for second-place, $3,000 for third place and $1,000 to each of the seven other finalists.

The first phase of the competition, open now, is accepting entries until February 15 2011. Developers will submit their games and have them rated by the Kongregate community, of which the top 25 will make it through to the second and final phase.

Judging criteria in the final round “will be based on creativity, innovation, enjoyability, use of Unity, and use and integration of the contest theme of endurance”, according to a statement from Kongregate.

Submissions must be in a Unity Game format integrated with the current Kongregate Statistics API.

Rules can be found here.