Statistics

Ranked 12th with 70 ratings (Score: 3.829)

I played and rated 128 games in the jam, which was 44.6% of the total number of games submissions in the jam. In return, 70 people played and rated my games, which was 24.4% of the total number of game submissions in the jam. 66 people left comments on my submission page.

Watching the Most Karma list (which I didn't find until the second-to-last day) I dropped from 4th to 6th. Watching the Popular list, I dropped from 3rd to 8th. Only one game higher than me on the Popular list ranked higher than me at the end of the jam. That was My Light and Spirit which got 3rd Overall and was 7th on the Popular list. (It was also one of the games I rated 5 stars myself). My conclusion is that however these lists are created, they are not indicators of how well your game will do at the end.

Of the games rated higher overall than mine, 5 had solo developers like myself, 4 had two developers, 1 had four developers, and 1 had six developers.

Initial Conclusions

It was disappointing that I didn't score in the top 10, but 12 is 8 higher than my best previous placement in a game of 20. I knew that there were some things that would cause me problems. First, I used, and made quite clear that I used, AI-generated music. Second, I had a lot of ratings. 6 times more than I've ever gotten in a game jam. This both averaged out people not liking my game, but muted the votes of people that really loved it and overall may have drawn my score down. Finally, I did have a few known issues that I didn't have time to fix that I believe hurt me based on the comments feedback.

Since my overall rating of 3.829 was a full point higher than I've ever gotten in a game jam - I'm quite happy with the result. I'm proud of what I accomplished in 6 days (see the Skele-Tom Post Mortem on how my computer caught fire and I lost 4 days), compared to the 10 days everyone else had. Additionally, there are a number of factors that one cannot control in the voting.

Ratings

More than half my ratings (38) came in the first two days of rating. In the first two days when I rated games, I got a reciprocal rating from everyone I rated. After that, the number of ratings per day dropped significantly, even though my rating kept pace each day. I got about 6 ratings on the second-to-last day when I replied to a "rate my game and I'll rate yours" thread. There were about a dozen games on that thread, and I had already rated all but 2. But replying to that thread got people whose game I had rated to come to my page and rate my game.

Feedback

I got a lot of feedback on my game. Most of it overwhelmingly positive, some of it begrudgingly positive, a small amount of it negative - all of it constructive. Even the people who were incensed about my use of AI music were nice about it. (It may be that the 4 people who did not comment tried to tank my scores out of anger about the usage of AI - I don't know.) The most disappointing thing was that all of the problems people had were things I knew about before I posted the game.

Takeaways

The biggest takeaway is less features - no known issues (bugs). I knew that my UI wasn't working with a mouse, but I didn't fix it because I was afraid it'd suck a lot of time away. I knew that I had some items in the foreground and background that were also springboards in the play area and they looked exactly alike. I knew that the buildings had some places you could get caught on. I knew that the coffin platforms could push the player into a wall causing a restart. Those brought my score down. Because when a game is simple, fun, and has no bugs - you have nothing to complain about and feel like scoring the game higher. Most of the games that scored higher than mine were simpler games. I should have fixed the bugs I knew about even if it meant less levels.

My second takeaway was that some people will hate you for using generative-AI for music, but if the music is a banger, most people will forgive you. I reached this conclusion because of all the categories I was rated in besides Overall, I did way worse in everything but Music. I also ranked #12 in that with 70 people voting. Which again, was almost a quarter of the people in the jam.