Thank you to everyone that participated! If you have any thoughts, feelings, feedback, or parting words, I'd love to hear them.

You want serious, proper feedback for the jam? Here's my feedback:

You're joking? You guys took an extra week to judge, and didn't even finish the games? I'm glad I dropped out of this, I'd rather put my time into a proper jam, with proper judging. There is clear bias when buggy, barely playable games (looking at you, top spot, can't even play past level 6) somehow win almost perfect scores in every category. I now seriously doubt that you lot actually played the games at all.

Next time you consider running a jam, especially with proper prizes, consider having more professional judges that aren't afraid of reading or playing games to the end.

I want to preface that I don't want to come across as full of myself or anything. I had a fun time with the jam and mostly joined to practice my development skills. I am disappointed by the judging results, though. Games that have a lot of bugs are ranked higher than ones that run with little to no issue. Also, some of the feedback doesn't make a lot of sense if it's supposed to be constructive criticism. I would think that the judges would be able to finish all of the games in 3 weeks, but it seems that they were unable to, which is a bit of a letdown.

Some of these ratings are just "not my type of game". Seriously? Judging a game based on personal preference is not how judging is supposed to work. This isn't a contest to impress 2-3 random people who you don't know, this is supposed to be a fair game jam not a lottery of preference.

I apologize for some of the lackluster feedback left on game pages. I am not able to oversee what every person writes, but it was my job to select who was on the judging panel.

I can assure you that even if one judge's scores were removed from the results, the top three games would have remained the same save for splitting up the tie for second place. Even if an entry has game breaking bugs or is difficult to finish, if the parts that are playable fulfills the categories then it can still get full points.

One of the judges has volunteered to give additional feedback, which I will be posting in their stead over the next few days.

Not to be rude but several of these judge responses leave much to be desired in terms of actual analysis of content .
To quote some of the more glaringly lacking responses verbatim:

• "I didn't beat it, but I like it a lot."
• "playing your game does not give up my right to complain about it." [sic]
• "not my kind of game." [sic]
• "this is a very unique game" [sic]
• "Normally I understand your games, but this one I just don't..."
• "its an okay tactics game, thats all i have to say." [sic]

These are meant to be judgements regarding the content of the game according to the provided score metrics, as far as I am able to tell, and explanations for said ratings.

As I earlier mentioned, many of these responses do very little in terms of explaining how and why the metrics given for each category per entry were decided, which, for lack of a better term, is rather disappointing, especially for rankings that had already been delayed by an entire week.

Additional feedback from the judges has been left on the submission page for each game. I understand this will not remove the blow of the unhelpful feedback left on the submissions, but I hope it helps participants understand better how their game was viewed.

Respecting the effort of everyone involved is my number one priority, and no one puts in more time, energy, or effort than the people who dedicate two weeks to making the wonderful games for this jam. Unconstructive feedback is disrespectful to that effort, and I am deeply sorry. The limitations of itch.io's jam format does not allow me to review the feedback section for each judge and had I known that there would be such unhelpful comments I would have immediately demanded it be redone.

The panel of judges was selected from people who are involved in the weight gain game dev community, including those who have participated in jams themselves. And as host, I know the participants put their trust in me to offer fair and constructive competition and rankings.

I would like to reiterate that even if the Offending Judge's scores were removed from the rankings, the same games would remain in the top three. In the future, I will be far more explicit with judges what is and is not acceptable feedback. Thank you everyone who has participated, voiced their feedback, and provided solutions to improve future jams.