Hello everyone!

Welcome to the empty void that is !Post Voting Stage! What sis you guys get? What did you learn? What went poorly and what went well?

I was sourly humbled by what I got, I definitely over estimated what a first solo jam goes like:

I was very surprised at what I got because the comments were really positive. I should have done more play testing to get feedback, as this would have made it a world better. Either way, I have updated the game now with the fixes suggested in said comments. 

- Cathode Interactive

I'm not unhappy with my scores. I would have liked more people to rate it, but unfortunately with this many games the most ranked games get more rankings and the least ranked games get more rankings (but it's spread out among all of them). You really do have to promote the game, because I only got more rankings when I posted in the discord

I had a great time participating!  3,530 entries is absolutely nuts (out of an initial 14,000+ people that JOINED the jam)!

Overall, I ranked #724.  Audio and Enjoyment were 350 (thanks ELV Games!) and 462.  My lowest scores were still in the top 50%.  I will take it.  Spinsanity outperformed all my previous releases and got more views and browser plays in two weeks than my previous game got over five months!

My first game jam, I really did not participate with the community, so I took that to heart in my last jam and this one.  I felt a bit bad because between work and school I was tied up a few days during the voting period, which I think hurt my momentum.  Like others have said, networking during/after is sometimes harder than working on the game itself!

I don't know if it helped or hurt but I tried to give feedback to games when I played them.  This lowered the number of games I could play in a sitting.  I tried to be constructive and offer actionable advice, but part of my wonders if I upset anyone because my rating distribution seems lower than I'd think considering the feedback received.

That said, I am happy I participated.  There are SO many talented people in that submitted, and a ton of games that I played where I said, "this isn't a good game for a game jam, this is just a good game."  Looking forward to the next one!

I'm literally already working on another jam project! It's for the Brainless jam, 

I hope I can place a little higher, also considering there are only 2,000 entrants this time...

Wish me luck!

I'm pretty happy about being in the top 10% (although the two one-star ratings I got do still sting a little).

Jam comments can be a little weird, and it's not uncommon for them to mismatch the final scores. There's a lot more at play than just 'do they like the game?' Since people are churning through a ton of games they may only bring up one or two aspects that they really liked without mentioning anything else to save time, or they might be worried that an overly critical comment may invite retaliation (which is dumb, but still a possibility), or they may not feel the need to say anything at all (my game for instance had way more ratings than comments, and I doubt the one-stars were given by people who commented).

IMO sometimes the important thing is to look at what people aren't saying. Again taking my game as an example, almost everyone who commented had something nice to say about the visuals and the concept creativity, so I knew I would score well in those areas. But comments about the audio were very sparse and it ended up being my lowest scoring category.

I’d say I’m pretty dang proud of our placement. While I hoped that we could’ve gotten in the top 1000 overall, I’m still really happy that we got a high ranking in Enjoyment. This was the first game me and my friends worked on, and considering I (the only programmer) had to juggle this project with my finals, all while half our team was unavailable for nearly the whole week, I’m content. Audio being low makes sense considering it was made last minute. My only complaint was getting more ratings, because nearly every positive comment was posted in the last couple of days of the jam.

I had pretty minimal time available around work and family - maybe 6-8 hours dev time, total. I came up with Serious & Precise International Navigation, and these are the ratings:

Going through the categories:

• Creativity & theme: I didn’t think it was particularly creative at all. I guess the theme is pretty strong, being the only game mechanic and all, but still very surprised to be placed #240 (works out to the top 7% or so) on that.

• seriousness: admittedly I have no idea how people are interpreting this. Personally I think I just gave 5 stars to everything as a well-done for taking it seriously enough to get something submission-ready.

• audio: it’s not that I think the audio’s great (it isn’t), but after seeing so many game jam (including most of mine, historically) submissions down the years with literally no audio I personally have a tendency to be pretty generous and not go below 3 stars for anything where the devs made the effort to actually put in some audio. I know I can’t expect everybody to have that policy, but I was a bit disappointed by the score of 2.85. I’m actually quite happy with the music given that it was <30 mins in GarageBand. There is a little bit of a joke in the music and nobody’s mentioned it in the comments. I can’t tell if that’s because I was too subtle and nobody noticed, or it just didn’t seem interesting enough to mention. I’ll award 100 Hound Points* to whoever identifies it first.

• visuals: 3 stars, I think that’s fair enough. Minimal visuals and they’re nothing special. Default Godot fonts, a background texture I drew in 5 minutes in GIMP. It would have been easy to take some public domain space and earth images and use those but I wanted everything to be my own, so a json defining the country border definitions was the only external thing I used (other than the engine!). I quite like my cartoony filling-in of the Earth, although with more time I’d definitely have liked to fix the seam on the texture. The ship doesn’t really fit, it’s just a pre-existing asset I made for another (so far unreleased) project I’m working on.

• enjoyment: There are a few things I’d like to have added with more time: boost/brake functions (maybe as limited-use powers) to give some chance to adjust your misjudged spins, a target country highlight. If I were starting again I’d probably implement the rolling controls differently, too. The idea was that the ‘speed’ version feels more like you’re actually using the mouse to spin the planet, more of a physical interaction. But in practice it’s very fiddly if you’re aiming for a short roll. Maybe that could also be solved by just adjusting the drag-speed<->spin-speed relationship, but ultimately I think the simpler option (drag an arrow and set spin speed by the length of the arrow) would probably have been more satisfying. With all of those things I think there’s a game in there that could get much better than 2.8 for enjoyment, but I didn’t find the time and the actual submission (while it can be kinda fun) is often a bit frustrating to play.

So in summary: positively surprised by score in one category, moderately disappointed by score in another, entirely uncertain how to interpret a third. The other two.. probably about right.

* Hound Points have no cash value and cannot be redeemed for prizes

That's a brilliant score for 3550 games! I released a new and improved version of my game the other day, Cart Wars, I would really appreciate it if you could give some feedback on the changes from the jam version!

I'm actually quite surprised with how my game was rated being that it's a pretty bare bones game. Like most people, I didn't get that many ratings but the people that did rate it seemed to enjoy it.