Why I didn’t rate your game
It sucks to have very few ratings and comments on your game, so here are a few pointers for next time.
Platform
The most rated games are the ones you can play in your browser. Try making your entry in java or in flash and embedding it in a webpage for maximum exposure. If you don’t want to have to suffer the horror that is (Java|AS|Flash) at least make a binary release for Windows since most people seem to have access to that platform (I don’t so please also make an OS X version 
). If you’re making your game in Python (or its pale imitator ruby 
, or any other interpreted language for that matter) you might think you don’t need binaries but you’re wrong, people aren’t going to install a different environment for every single game. Same for Löve games.
Dependencies
If you do only release as source, or if you only release for one platform, or dynamically link libraries, keep dependencies to a minimum. If all I have to do to build the game is type “make” there’s a better chance I’ll try it than if I have to install 13 libraries which each in turn depend on half a dozen others.
Screenshot
I try to play all games regardless of the screenshot (in part because my own drawing skills are easily surpassed by those of a drunk monkey with a pen) but if the entry requires more than clicking on a shiny icon to run, I’ll definitely spend more time trying to get an entry with a cool screenshot working.
Rate other games (and leave comments!)
While I am determined to try as many games as I can, I prioritize rating the games from the people who left comments on my games first.
Of course these “rules” aren’t set in stone. You can make a game for the Atari 2600 and still have plenty of ratings. You can also make a game with an uninspiring screenshot and win best overall.
Of course you could also cheat by making a ton of games under different names to rate your own games .
I think that the fact that mine is a Flash game was an incentive to rate it, definitely. Good tips overall.
I think I probably would’ve gotten more ratings if my screenshot wasn’t dark as hell, but I had trouble taking something fairly representative of the game that didn’t spoil the ending.
That and I was really, really tired.
I realised the last point had an effect after getting a few comments of my own, so although I’ve had plenty of other distractions I’ve been trying to rate at least twice as many people as have rated me. Makes more sense than the “rate as many as you get” idea in my humble opinion.
Hear, hear!
Incidentally, i try to rate every single game (which became quite a workload this time). I’ve got only access to Windows, so naturally i’d like a runnable binary.
There’s no problem when someone creates a Win32 binary for Python after the 48 hours, it lets me judge his game (which i trust to be the same as the LD48 version).
I do not see that i need to install lots of libraries though (Python, why o why, does every single addon need to be installed separately?)
I work the ratings from top to bottom, without looking at the screenshot grid (would probably a good idea to not have the grid on the same page, must be quite bandwidth consuming). Of course there’s the one or other entry that looks great and i’d love to play it.
Then there’s the point with requirements. It’s a damn 48h contest, not a AAA game dev. Why do i need shaders for a simple game?
I was also surprised with the OpenGL entries this round. I had one not working at all because PyGame insisted on some weird extension (which should be pretty common and at least work on my FX 5500).
I’ve rated quite a few . I had problems with the python ones that were not py to exe’d. I rated as many of those as I could, then found myself in the midst of a windows reinstall.
I plan to rate a couple a day during this week, and set aside 2-3 hours this weekend and may succeed at rating everything. Although in a couple of cases that will consist of n/a except for your journaling if I can’t get it to download or choose not to run it. (source code only). So far that’s 3 of the 55 I’ve completed.
I hear you. At the same time, as long as it’s technically possible for me to run something, I’ll install anything (short of malware) that’s needed. It doesn’t usually take long to download, and in the meantime I can go try other entries.
One thing is that I often have trouble downloading from getdropbox and other filehosting services. May I suggest that people look into using free webspace to host their games? That’s what I did (using Googlepages/Google Sites), and it seems to work pretty well as far as I can make out – at least nobody’s complained yet. I hardly think that a 48-hour game would be so huge that it can’t be contained on free webspace. (Of course, there’s always the torrent…)
Endurion: Yeah, I’m trying to rate every game too, or at least as many as I can (think I’ve done about half the entries). On the shader side, a lot of times the easiest way to make things work is to target Shader Model 2.0, since 1.1′s instruction set is pretty gimped. This usually means that if you’re using shaders, a Geforce FX is the minimum. It’s really troublesome to work without shaders if you’re using a modern engine (XNA, TGE Advanced, etc), so there you go. I’m not sure why a game would need shaders that your FX doesn’t support (Shader Model 3.0, I guess), though – possibly their shader code is (1) poorly written, or more likely (2) hastily written, or (3) they borrowed a super-overpowered shader from somewhere and didn’t have the time or ability to rewrite it into something that would compile under 2.0.
Mike_W: Wow, I don’t think I have your level of patience
Right now I’m concentrating on trying to rate the less popular entries. If I finish those, then I’ll see about the rest…