Suggestion Post
Posted by PoV (twitter: @mikekasprzak)
August 30th, 2009 6:58 pm
Hi everybody!
I’m getting a lot of comments in IRC about things, so I figure I’d start a post to collect them all.
So if you have any thoughts about how thing ran this weekend, or the voting, post a reply here. This way, they’re all in one place, and we can see them when we get a chance.
Thanks!
I’ve got a little bug report.
I read a post from PoV that we should rate entries without sound / humour for example, as 1 star instead of N/A – I didn’t know this when I started, so I just went back and fixed the ones where I gave N/A instead of 1. After saving these votes with the modified scores, the voting screen summary table, shows that I left no comment for the update ones (even though I left comments for all but 2 of the games I reviewed).
It’s not critical, but just thought I’d report it…
Noted. Thanks for the report.
I received a report that a user may have updated their compo game link with newer version with new features. Since the change over we don’t yet have a policy on this, but I guess since the Competition is stricter, we should probably at least talk about it for the future.
It would be nice is the web page titles were not always “Ludum Dare >> Ludum Dare 18″ but included for example the game name when we’re on a game page. Because sometimes there’s a lot of clicking around to return to a particular page (for example my own entry – I couldn’t find a quick way to access it, or a particular game’s page I know I’ve been to earlier), so using the history is faster.
I’ve noticed that the ratings for some games will have a line that’s 1s across the board, for every category (my entry was lucky enough to have two such lines), when everyone else’s ratings for the game are more average-ish. Do some people do this as a default when they can’t run a game for some reason, or something, or do some people just REALLY dislike every aspect of some games?
That makes me think a “How does this game work on your computer” category would be great. This would encourage cross-platform creation that also works on “older” computers… And maybe calm angry people who can’t play the game so that they don’t downvote the other categories
! In any case, a rating guide is needed IMO.
I find I’m always refreshing my entry page to see if anyone has left any new feedback on my game.
cheap basketball jerseysIt would be cool if I could just subscribe to an rss feed instead.Warning, if you for some reason enter this link on your browser:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-19/?action=save
It will clear your entry information! I’ve lost mine, so beware!
I’m guessing it has to do with not having any data in the GET or POST headers. But it’s a nasty bug that should be taken care of.
I hope it helps.
Consider “Mood” as a replacement category for Humor. It can be all encompassing, funny games, serious, story driven, etc.
However, it may not be obvious humor is a legal “mood”, so it may have to be double named “Humor and Mood” or “Mood or Humor”.
Also, Innovation seems to be a lacking category. What if it was “Identity and Innovation”? Or “Uniqueness”?
Hey PoV, I messed up again my entry. Apparently I never closed the “nasty link” tab and when reopening firefox I messed it again. Sorry :/
The PHP (or whatever) has to check if POST variables are cleared and abort before submitting to the database.
Right now it seems that it checks it, SAVES it, and then shows “These fields are missing” (after saving to the database)
Two things: First of all, it would be really nice if we could filter entries by available platforms; of course, this would not be foolproof since people type their own link descriptors, but even being able to run a basic text search through those fields would be great; regex search would be even better. (On a semi-related nitpicky side note, the default second platform listed still seems to be spelled ‘Mac OS/X’… the LD website is the only place I’ve ever encountered that spelling. It’s just ‘Mac OS X’ or or ‘Mac OSX’)
Second, it would be really nice if, when you logged in, it returned you back to the page you were looking at instead of taking you to the WP dashboard; since usually I want to log in so that I can rate a game, or comment on a post, and navigating back to the appropriate page is a hassle, if a minor one.
You can try this GreaseMonkey script by hdon:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2010/12/24/best-way-to-ld19-list-entries/
On the user profile pages, list all games created by users (i.e. for all compos, list all games by “me”).
Yes please!
Yes this gets my vote, too
I enjoyed taking part in the Jam once again with my friend Kieran, but I feel again (and know you’ve had this feedback before) that there is too little incentive for people to pay any sort of attention to the Jam compared to the competition.
Rating the games is part of the fun and while I realise that the Jam isn’t supposed to be a competition, I don’t think there could be any harm in improving the interaction and feedback part of the Jam beyond just having the comments box for people to write their stuff in.
Perhaps if there was an equivalent rating system for the Jam games, but no formal winners, or anything else to give that side of the event just a little bit of a kick. It’s a little disheartening to me after putting so much work into the Jam to them find nobody really talking about those entries.
To help get more evenly distributed votes, it would be nice with a list of the games with the least votes.
Maybe there could even be a coolness bonus for voting on the top games on that list.
It probably doesn’t matter much, since ludum dare is for fun, and I mean this in all sincerity and with a total lack of enmity or anger. The judging system is broken. I mean, it’s fun and light and silly, but it really doesn’t seem to reward the things that make games great. There’s no categories for design, completeness, complexity, engineering, etc. Confusing categories like community and humor reward specific behavior instead of games. Star limits are arbitrary and subjective. I’d love to get some guide points in here ’3 stars is for an average level of fun. a game you would play once and somewhat enjoy, but that’s about it’.
I had a lot of fun on the dare, and judging aside, clearly we all win for just having participated. I feel that it would give the dare even more strength / clout / pull if the system were to avoid reward niches.
I wish I had a better way to put it, and I hope anyone won’t take offense to the remarks. Just seems like if you want to ‘win the dare’ and not just in the sense of having participated and learned something, then you should come up with a design that specifically games the categories.
Looking forward to the next dare (if I can find the time to participate!). This one was a blast.
random brain thingy: could you weight judging values by the quality of the judges? seems like you can already tell how active accounts are, how veteran, etc. I’m not sure this is actually a good idea, but there are other sites out there that gives moderation powers to highly active users to control the quality of feedback. Could imagine something similar here.
Would be nice if someone could add this link to the “IRC Info” Page.
It’s the official webirc of afternet so I guess thats a save one.
https://qwebirc.afternet.org/?channels=LudumDare
best regards
Added.
Hi
there is a way to mark some games as my favourite?
Have some way to create/populate a list of live streams (or other very interesting links) specific to an event. UStream isn’t the only service though; Hamumu is using something called LiveStream.
Open a discussion (after the event) how else we can improve things for Jammers.
ExciteMike rocks, but we should do a proper version of this (i.e. make a comment RSS feed)
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2011/05/02/get-an-rss-feed-for-comments-on-your-game-2/
I received the suggestion on IRC that we should run this:
http://www.varnish-cache.org/
Looks to be server level though, which we don’t have access to on our shared host. Still good point, we should probably run a cache plugin.
It seems the “list growing” feature of the rating system has flaws. When people can’t play a game, they can’t rate them. If they don’t rate games (dummy rate), their list cannot grow.
Include all games you have rated on your voted games list (the guys in #LD have suggested it might be an SQL join, or something along those lines?).
Update our plugins to support Hype Cache. Details in the technical notes section:
http://www.satollo.net/plugins/hyper-cache
Here’s the cache plugin reviews I was looking at: http://www.tutorial9.net/tutorials/web-tutorials/wordpress-caching-whats-the-best-caching-plugin/
Oops! You can’t actually see the theme list unless you are logged in (and have an account).
I have a suggestion for the voting. At the start of voting, you could collect all of the link types (“Web”, “Flash”, “Linux”, “Windows”, etc…) from all the games. You could then have about a day for each user with a submitted entry to fill out a form where they can check which type they are willing/capable to open/play. The suggested-for-rating-games could then be distributed accordingly and would be that much more likely to be voted on.
Make coolness determined by how many games you commented on, not how many games you voted on.
Don’t think this is a good idea. For some games there’s not really anything worth saying about them and I’d end up feeling obliged to write stuff like ‘uh… game successfully loaded, congrats!’, or for games where people have already commented on everything, ‘see above’.
If you can’t think of anything to say then don’t say anything. But there’s almost always something worth saying about a game if you take the time to think about it, and it is really nice to have feedback on what you’ve made. Written feedback is worth way more than votes.
I think that giving folks a list of a few jam games to comment on alongside the random list of compo games would be nice, and would get some comments for jam games.
Plus, making comments on jam games count toward coolness.
I love the jam, but I wish it was more integrated into LD as a whole.
The main issue I encountered was wasting time on games I could not play..
There should be a screen where you can set the categories you can actually play.
This will filter out all the games that you cannot play.
Examples:
Game requirements:
Specific OS(Windows, Linux, Mac)
Specific Framework
Specific browser
Other specific download..
That way I can set: Windows/Linus + Flash, Unity, Java & XNA.. and filter the rest.
This does not include games that include a small simple additional download.
Some people don’t want to install a specific tool to play games
Just a minor suggestion, but maybe we could incorporate some newgrounds rating style into Ludum Dare. By this I mean that people playing your game would only be able to rate it if they clicked the link to open the game. This will prevent trolls and generally stupid people from going around rating ones on everything. I know this might not be that big of a problem now, but at the rate Ludum Dare is growing, it might become a problem later.
Do a list by computer language used with source links. It will be good for people trying to learn game dev.
Minor site bug: when rating, the “Play another game!” section can list your own.
Allowing us to see our rankings, beyond the top 50/top 25 would be really nice!
It’s unfortunate if you didn’t make it in these areas, but have no idea how you did anyway.
The Conspirator suffered from a long running time and a really depressing topic. It could have done with a tighter link wheel script. James McAvoy brilliant as always. I prefer stories about peripheral figures during the Civil War, e.g. An Acquaintance with Darkness and Lincoln’s Dreams. Great books, get a copy!