Tennis Masters is planned to be an online tennis management game. The
game puts the players in charge of managing their own academy of
tennis players and making them stars. The idea of the game originated
in August 09 and active development kick started in October 09. The
game is currently being developed by a team of two, using PHP as the
coding language.

What went right?

We decided to enter BBGameZone’s Competition 2010 to complete a
Browser Based Game in a month. The competition deadline was an
incentive for us to complete the game. Before the competition
deadline, we had a rough base code that was ready. We attempted to
leverage the existing code base to complete the game quickly. During
the one month period, we put in a lot of effort in the Match Engine.
The Match Engine of the game is the core of the game and would be
responsible for simulating the matches. Since we realized that the
game would be judged based on usability, we decided to work on the
Help Manuals, so that the user would not be left clueless when
visiting the site.

What went wrong?

As evident, since we did not complete the game in time, there was
plenty that went wrong. As both of us happen to be new dads, we had to
balance the time we spent on the game with the new responsibilities in
our lives. There were times when communication was lacking between the
two of us. As we were nearing the deadline of the competition, we
realized that we would not be able to complete the game and decided to
take it a bit easy.

In conclusion, although we did not complete our game in time, we
really cherished being part of the game making competition. We plan to
start our beta season in April and would be happy to see you join and
help us build a better tennis management game. The demo website is at
http://demo.tennismasters.org and our game development forum is
located at http://dt-games.net/gamesetmatch

The contest will run for two months, ending on December 11th. The winner of the contest will be the game that is deemed to be ‘most fun’ by the judges(who haven’t been announced just yet). There are a lot of advertising-related prizes available to win – perfect tools to help you get your game to critical mass after you’ve built it. Building Browsergames is also one of the sponsors of the contest – if you win, we’ll review your game and interview you!

One point that needs to be mentioned is that this contest is for new games only – you cannot enter a game that you have already built or been working on. Other than that it’s fair game though.

Sound interesting? Take a look at the contest page for more information, and good luck!