That's not what I'm getting at at all.  What I'm proposing is that we end this contest, award you the prize money, and then run it again with more advertising.  If I commit to a contest, I see it through regardless of the number of entries -- if I didn't, people wouldn't have any reason to have faith in our contests, and nobody would enter. :)

Yeah, Antifarea does good work. :)

All participants will receive this stylish badge:

Winners will receive the gold version.  :)

The badge set for this week is built on sunburn's medal bases and uses a crystal from Ails' fantasy icon set.  They are licensed CC-BY-SA 3.0.  You can find the source files here:

http://opengameart.org/content/oga-medals
http://opengameart.org/content/420-pixel-art-icons-medievalfantasy-rpg

This is kind of drifting away from the sort of contest that I had in mind. :)

I probably should have been more clear about the goals I had when I came up with this.  They are:

• Get some exposure for some of the under-utilized FOSS game engines out there.  One thing I've noticed about the open source game development community is that we have a ton of engines and not really all that many games.  People go out of their way to make their engines extensible, and it's very rare that someone will actually pick one of those engines up and make a game out of it.  Most people decide to write a game from scratch (or mostly from scratch).  Mind you, I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with that, but I wanted a contest that would encourage people to turn over a new leaf and put together an open source game using an existing engine -- particularly given how many good engines are already out there.
• Keep it short and simple.  The other common problem I see with FOSS games is the "My gigantic MMORPG is going to be awesome!" problem.  Now, in saying this, I have to give a nod to the successful FOSS MMORPG projects out there, but they're definitely a rare breed.  My point is that there are far more overambitious, failed projects out there than there are successful ones.  Now, a contest for creating a short game will result in a number of "throw-away" games, as you called them, but I would posit that a contest for creating a larger and more ambitious game would result in a similar number of throw-away concepts and very few actual finished games, if any at all.  Plus, OGA is still a fairly small community.  We're a lot more likely to get a solid showing if we ask for small projects that one developer can finish in a week or two, rather than big projects that will take a whole team many months.
• Help build a mod community.  Closed-source games manage to build up huge mod communities.  Why can't we do the same?
• Finished games, even small ones, generate a lot more publicity than unfinished ones.

I'd like to state for the record that, despite what I said above, I'm not against having a more open-ended game contest where people are allowed to design and build an ambitious game from scratch.  It's just not what I was intending with this particular contest, and it's something that I think we ought to do.  I just think it should be a different contest is all. :)

Thoughts?