First off, I just want congratulate the winners and everyone who entered this jam. Each person deserves recognition for actually making a game, making art, making music, improving their skills, and putting themselves out there. Excellent work everybody, and I wish you the best on your next games!
Now here comes the hard part, and I say it in respect, but I feel like one aspect of the competition could’ve been handled a bit better. There was a disconnect in communication about how games would be scored. My partner and I focused on game stability (Ex. a bug-free experience) and completeness instead of putting in as much content as we could. We had a lot of ideas we wanted to implement, but we thought that the game had to be served as a complete package with minimal errors. We would’ve risked a lot more (Ex. including additional mechanics or mini-games) if we understood that performance/completeness was less of a focus than concept.
When making a game, you typically have to do what “works”, and for our first jam, we wanted to limit our ideas to concepts that are stable and can be fully completed.
However, despite that, the jam was a very fun experience and the two of us are looking forward to entering your next one. We just hope that the rules are a bit clearer next time, so we can really push ourselves and experiment freely!