How correlated categories are to the overall score
The single best indicator of what your overall score will be, is how fun your game is. Innovation, theme, and graphics all are noticeably correlated with the overall score (though a few outliers managed to get a good overall score without meeting the theme). Audio has a slight correlation. Games with good humor tend to have a high overall score, but games with little humor don’t necessarily have a low overall rating.
Next I have a few observations on the ranges of values in various categories.
Innovation: Very few games scored below 2 in innovation. It’s clear that innovation is being done.
Theme: Most of the entries made a good attempt at the theme, but a few seemed to ignore it.
Audio: Not many entries scored well in audio, and some put little or no audio in their game. Does this mean participants don’t have very good audio skills, or just that audio was somewhat neglected in the competition?
Humor: Very few games rated above a 3 in humor. Only handful of games both tried to be funny and succeeded.
Interesting data!
Very cool.. thanks for putting this together.
This is really awesome! Thanks!
-Phil
That graph of Fun vs Overall is awesome.
It’s all about the fun factor
Fun is king, as it should be. The stats tell us that the humor category isn’t making an impact and perhaps should be eliminated. I found none of the games I played to be in the slightest bit funny, though I do wish they were. It’s hard to be funny!
Dude, very cool.
Wow, nice stats. I’m going to have to nit-pick on something though.
“and some put little or no audio in their game.”
this has been bugging me for a long time. The sort of “lots of audio == higher audio score” attitude. It’s the same Idea as “Higher resolution == good graphics”. If your game’s audio helps it share the desired message, then you should get a high audio rating. If the game only needs one audio loop and 2 sound effects to give the desired ambiance and mood, then it shouldn’t need to have 30 audio tracks and SFX for everything to get a 5 in audio. (Of course the quality of the audio is important, I just feel a lot of people are going “oh man lots of well-recorded songs 4/5″ and aren’t really paying attention to how the music adds to the game.)
Not so much directed at the poster, just saw an opportunity to get this out there.
You make a good point about how audio should enhance a game.
I personally gave a 2 or higher to anyone who made a decent attempt at sound effects and/or music, and reserved a 1 for those who didn’t put any audio in. I don’t know if other people voted the same way.
My graphs are now under the creative commons attribution license if anyone has a use for them.