While my game didn’t do terribly well in LD 23, it got overall average scores, I did get quite a bit of plays and a lot of good feedback on it.  I decided why not, take it and expand it out further.  Well this has taken FAR longer than expected and I ended up developing a full cross-platform 2d game engine/library that supports Android NDK/Linux/Windows/Mac in the process, but as of last night the extended edition of my LD23 game “Tiny Defenders” Is available on google play

First off, a link to the free version:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.raptor85.tinydefendersfree

And a link to the compo page!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=7131

But that’s not  the primary purpose of this post!   I wish i had though of it sooner and done more in between but i’ve started doing video logs of my development so following this sentence i’ll have a few videos, starting with a video of the competition version, showing how the game evolved as i tried new things and added on to what I already had.  I actually think it’s kinda interesting to see how something starts from a tiny little ludum dare game and evolves into a full game.

Click the link to view the rest of this post! i’m hiding it under a “more” tag otherwise it’ll eat up the entire front page….it’s huge!

(more…)

I’ve said my thoughts on the current ranking system elsewhere so no real need to re-state here, but theres something to me that’s quite a bit worse that could be addressed, and this is more of a community thing really but perhaps there’s some way for LD24 some “encouragement” could be put in place to do it.

Much like LD22 I take the same issue with my comments/feedback…..my comments and feedback are 100% positive (well..99%..someone did bring up that more feedback in the HUD would have been nice ), nobody could really say a bad thing at all.. out of just over 100 ratings 40 of said people posted that they “loved” the audio and thought it was “really really fun!”….and that was about the extent of my feedback. (And not just my game of course, I’m just using it as a easy example as it effects me the most personally, many many others I’ve browsed through are the same, nothing but positive feedback and glowing praise towards the game….then a really low score)

I scored a 3.07 in fun and 2.75 in audio

Now…whatever, those scores arent “bad” by any means, but they don’t reflect the feedback in the least!  if 40 people of 100 “loved” those….then I’m looking at probably 20-30 ratings who did not like the gameplay/audio who did not leave feedback.

That sucks…mostly because it’s the feedback from those who didn’t like the game that I care about, I want to hear why they didn’t like it!  As much as I appreciate the “I love it!” posts as feedback goes negative feedback is far more helpful. I don’t know if people are just too “polite” to post things they didn’t like or if they are somehow afraid of being “retaliated” against and being given a bad score on their game or what, but, at least to me, I enjoy feedback good and bad…It lets me know which things I tried people liked and which things i tried people didn’t like so I can either explore further into an idea or avoid it in the future.  (Especially in something like this where I made a game type I’ve never done before AND tried a few twists from the “norm” in it’s genre)

So, in saying that, I’d like to re-iterate my suggestion I brought up prior to LD23 based on my experiences from LD22….we need some sort of way to allow people to attach an anonymous comment to their vote (well, the site would still know who posted it, just dont show the name) but still leave a way to leave comments in the thread like we can do now (showing our names).  Perhaps this would allow more people who don’t want to say anything bad to open up a bit and give honest feedback?

Feedback has to consist of both what worked and what did not work to be effective….just my $0.02

Just updated the spreadsheet generated from the LD stats page, cleaned it up a little to make it easier to read this time.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ao74NZQqNUt5dDNvZUJ1UXVqZGkxUGVlVkxlZ3JnM2c

•  226 people have rated 0 games
• 60 rated only 1
• 251 rated 2-10 only
• 167 rated over 100
• current average = 35

For anyone who want’s to get a few more ratings in before deadline, you’re free to add mine to the list

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=7131 </self pimpage>

A lot of this will obviously be the same as my “best of” review from the first 200 games I rated, but got a few new ones

As always…these are MY opinions, you may or may not agree, but I feel these games could use some attention as I feel that they “stand out” from the crowd.  As per usual…no particular order.

I would appreciate more reviews and feedback on my entry as well!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=7131

Polarity By nornagon: A clever two button puzzle game. Not too long or difficult but very well made.

Microscopia By azurenimbus: Unique gameplay…to say the least. Challenging yet fun…and very fitting of the theme.

Asylum By Orni: A good take on the theme, fluid controls, art style isn’t my favorite but it works ok.  A little slow paced at first and somewhat short but it left the correct “feeling” behind when done.

It’s a tiny world By Endurion: A clever and fun “single screen” roguelike.  Though I think it stretches the theme a bit this title definitely deserves a mention simply because…it’s really fun! (and that’s what games are supposed to be at their core, when you strip all the excess from them)

Memento XII By deepnight: A little point & click adventure game, great style and atmosphere, though a little frustrating at times figuring out what you can or cannot click on.  Not a fan of the audio but well worth mentioning.

Bottlecolonies By tcstyle : A clever little strategy/puzzle  game, the art direction is great, the sound both fitting and awesome, and the gameplay itself is solid and complete…a joy to play

Nanofactory By JustinMullin: A solid puzzle game about a nanobot assembling widgets, a little hard and cryptic at first but the puzzles are both simple and clever

ANT SURF HERO: THE SURFENING By Jigxor:  A refreshing change from the massive number of dull uninspired platformers,  aside from a few physics issues it’s really fun,  and riding on top of the ant is amusing to say the least.

Housefly By dacap: You play as a fly on a mission: to get back outside!  It’s a short but very immersive adventure game with solid controls, great visuals and sound…its hard to describe but the flight control feels “right” for a fly. Very fun.

Recluse By chambers: You play as a snail with a neckbeard in a “metroidvania” type game….but with a twist.  Easy 5/5 for innovation personally, I don’t want to ruin it by the starting room is misleading and it quickly introduces one of the most unique gameplay mechanics i’ve ever seen. (even if it is mostly a gimmick…it fits the theme very well)

Hero of Rain By 31eee384: Extremely incomplete but what there is of it is very enjoyable, the story is both fitting and interesting, the gameplay is for the most part pretty good (though touchy at parts). All around a good feel to this game.

Fusion Time! By NeiloGD: A simple but solid arcade-type game where you fuse atoms in a sun.  Theres not much too it but the explosions and strategy of timing the fusing makes it surprisingly fun to play.

Honorable Mentions: Things under here are games that did very well in some areas but poorly in others, so they don’t really hit my “best of” list but they’re worth mentioning for other reasons.

Let’s Go Moon By Transmit: This is the only Jam entry on this list, but it deserves some attention. You play as the moon who is trying to grow bigger by eating asteroids/other planets on a quest to destroy the earth and take it’s place.  If that didn’t make you click the link and play it immediately there is something wrong with you.

Intersection By cltatman: Unique gameplay, uses two sets of controls (intended for 2 people but probably actually easier with just one). A little confusing but fun.

Tiny Island Adventure By AdventureIslands: This game has EXCEPTIONAL artwork and is a fresh take on the theme.  Don’t get me wrong, I love this game, but unfortunately it has some pretty bad control issues and the levels were a bit uninteresting.  Kept it from being in my “top” overall  picks but still worth a look, and IMHO could very well take the gold for “graphics”

Gale Axile By free_napalm: This game has some very clever gameplay mechanics, and is EXTREMELY innovative. It was definitely a refreshing break from the zillion and first back-to-back “planet defender” game played.  While I like it and the mechanics are unique it unfortunately has a big problem for me…the outcome is so random and the gameplay is so tedious that it’s just not very fun as is…though with a little work post-compo it could be a VERY good game.

Green Invasion By Kableado: The art in this game is FANTASTIC to say the least, it really is great. Unfortunately…that’s all there is to it, as a game it’s incomplete, there’s absolutely no gameplay implemented, no real sound, no goal.

Predicament By orangepascal: Again, another game with very good artwork, if a little TOO pixelated making it sometimes hard to see.  It’s a somewhat innovative mini-advanture game.  Unfortunately though the controls can be a little frustrating and the lack of any sort of ambient sound took away from it somewhat.

Mayor vs Aliens By Sheep: Very innovative, very funny, easily one of the best takes on the theme I’ve seen. The gameplay is ok but not great, the controls are a little stiff, and it’s wayyy too easy, you can pretty much defend indefinitely since they always go straight up the middle after taking the dirt.

Mini-Worlds and Monocles By Zed: VERY good sound in this game, one of the best.  Aside from that not much to talk about…it’s not “bad” but it’s really just another in a long line of generic “pick up the coin, move to next level” platformers.  Not very innovative and the jump controls are pretty frustratingly bad.  Still worth mentioning for it’s audio and humor though.

The Good Ship Higgs Boson By Jezzamon: Easily one of the most fun entries in the entire compo. EXTREMELY fun gravity based platformer.  Honestly though, aside from the name, it doesnt really fit the theme at all, the graphics were nothing special, and the sound lacking.  It is VERY fun though and I suggest playing it, and I suggest to the author clean it up a bit and publish a full version of this game….I think it would do quite well!

Complaints: While many things have bugged me…these top that list…

1. LABEL YOUR GAMEs PLATFORM PROPERLY!!! – Seriously, many “Windows” links to a jar file or HTML page, and far too many people thinking “Web” is a platform in itself.  Even if your game is web based list it’s required platform.  If you used unity web player don’t call it “Web” call it “Unity Web Player”…if you used flash 12 call it “Flash 12″…if it’s html5 call it “HTML 5″ and list which browsers you’ve tested it in.  If java7 is required… call it by which platforms are supported (if you used native libs) but specify it requires java 7. This would save a lot of headache and a lot of wasted time for those of us rating, some of these games take 10-15 minutes to download only to see a crash message.
2. Package your dependencies! – I put this in my “how to get more ratings post too, so I’ll simply link to that here after the gripe. In short, there’s 1400 games to rate, i’m not going to spend a hour per game installing every library it needs, which is often impossible as it would conflict with libraries on my system. i’ll skip and play the games that were nice enough to copy + paste the required files into their zip. Full version of this gripe here…
3. Use a file host that doesn’t suck! – The two biggest offenders here are MediaFire and Kongregate, both force delays before download and play. MediaFire blocks direct access to the file so you have to browse into their site…wait for them to “prepare download”..wait for the link, click it, then since you’re not a member get a stunning 50kB/s download rate.  There’s plenty of other free hosts, the popular ones here seem to be dropbox, google, and github.  For flash stuff…kongregate is terrible. I understand wanting it to be out there where the first few hits from LD will push it’s popularity up later but sitting through advertisements (if adblock is off) or having to wait out a dialog window if it detects your running adblock is HORRIBLE when you’re rating games….plus every few games it trys to make you create an account.  Newgrounds/dropbox or any of the other hosts really make it far easier on reviewers.

Everyone should plot where they’re at on the LD world map….doesn’t need to be exact, since it’s google-maps based just put city + state and it’ll put a “approximate” tag for you….or however “close” of an approximation to your area you want.  Would be kinda cool to see where most people are clustered around…interesting to see how right now it looks like a lot of people are in a few city areas and the rest of us pretty spread out. (right now 4 of us total in so-cal…and only two of us in the LA area)

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/world-map/

made a quick graph of current “coolness” vs “ratings” to show the trend, blue line is the data averaged, red line is the actual trend, yellow line is the “average” number of votes.  Should make it pretty obvious that the best way to get more people to rate your game is to rate other peoples games….so if you’re below that yellow line get crackin…it’s been 10 days, even if you only did 5-10 games a day (which takes no time at all, most games are short and take 5 minutes tops to beat) you should be at 50-100 ratings by now!

Oh also, here’s a spreadsheet version of the LD stats page, more useful cuz you can sort it!

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ao74NZQqNUt5dDNvZUJ1UXVqZGkxUGVlVkxlZ3JnM2c

Edit: I should clarifiy, the yellow line is average as per the trend, not per person…it’s more of a “where you should be” to ensure you receive a median number of ratings to your game.  For those curious though, currently there’s an average of 26.somehting ratings per game.

If your game is dependant on any sort of libraries or frameworks INCLUDE THEM IN THE DOWNLOAD .  There have been far too many games i’ve come across where the first step to get it running would be to hunt down and download a half dozen development frameworks…matching EXACT versions to what the developer used, just to get it to run.

When I come across these, I skip them and move on to the next game, I’m sure most other people do too.  I’m sorry but with 1400+ games I’m not going to stop and take 30 minutes to hunt down and install the exact version of lwjgl you used to develop, or build a copy of libpng12 from source so i don’t have to downgrade half my system to get it installed.

For Windows:

I haven’t developed for windows in a long time, but IIRC visual studio has a dependency checker addon you can use if for som reason you have  no idea which libraries you’re using in your project.  For instance if you used SDL include all the SDL .dll files you require in the download, do not expect people to go out and download the SDL libraries from their site and install it systemwide for a single game.  For stuff you can’t just distribute the .dll files, link or include the framework installers (depending on size)

For Linux:

Run ldd on the binary before you package it and copy all the .so files required into the package.  This is especially important if you’re using “unstable” or svn/git builds of libraries as your versions will tend to be incompatible with any version but a latest svn/git build. (meaning most distros you’d have to go and change your entire setup to run the “unstable” branch just to get the game working).  Here is an example script you can use if you want to automate this process for you http://www.h3manth.com/content/copying-shared-library-dependencies

For Java:

Most java frameworks have pretty good instructions on how to package the native libraries, and yet far too many this LD provide the .jar file but none of the deps.  This will cut down a lot on how many people can review your game as the only people that can run it are those with java dev environments already set up.  Another important note is that java7 jre is not yet standard, so if you have no real reason to compile using java7..dont..compile with java6 and a lot more people will be a ble to run it.

For Love2D:

for the windows build, use the tool that provides a exe, for the linux/mac builds, pack the interpreter + .so files with the .love files for those who do not have it installed or have a different version of love2d installed can run it.

For HTML5:

It’s understandable for the WebGL games to not run in browsers that don’t support webgl, but by far the most common reason for not running has been use of .mp3 files for sound.  It will increase the size slightly (though not as much as you would think, unless it’s a music game with 30+ minutes of sound) but if you use .wav instead it works on any browser.

As always…these are MY opinions, you may or may not agree, but I feel these games could use some attention as I feel that they “stand out” from the crowd.  As per usual…no particular order.

Asylum By Orni: A good take on the theme, fluid controls, art style isn’t my favorite but it works ok.  A little slow paced at first and somewhat short but it left the correct “feeling” behind when done.

It’s a tiny world By Endurion: A clever and fun “single screen” roguelike.  Though I think it stretches the theme a bit this title definitely deserves a mention simply because…it’s really fun! (and that’s what games are supposed to be at their core, when you strip all the excess from them)

Memento XII By deepnight: A little point & click adventure game, great style and atmosphere, though a little frustrating at times figuring out what you can or cannot click on.  Not a fan of the audio but well worth mentioning.

Bottlecolonies By tcstyle : A clever little strategy/puzzle  game, the art direction is great, the sound both fitting and awesome, and the gameplay itself is solid and complete…a joy to play

Nanofactory By JustinMullin: A solid puzzle game about a nanobot assembling widgets, a little hard and cryptic at first but the puzzles are both simple and clever

ANT SURF HERO: THE SURFENING By Jigxor:  A refreshing change from the massive number of dull uninspired platformers,  aside from a few physics issues it’s really fun,  and riding on top of the ant is amusing to say the least.

Housefly By dacap: You play as a fly on a mission: to get back outside!  It’s a short but very immersive adventure game with solid controls, great visuals and sound…its hard to describe but the flight control feels “right” for a fly. Very fun.

Recluse By chambers: You play as a snail with a neckbeard in a “metroidvania” type game….but with a twist.  Easy 5/5 for innovation personally, I don’t want to ruin it by the starting room is misleading and it quickly introduces one of the most unique gameplay mechanics i’ve ever seen. (even if it is mostly a gimmick…it fits the theme very well)

Hero of Rain By 31eee384: Extremely incomplete but what there is of it is very enjoyable, the story is both fitting and interesting, the gameplay is for the most part pretty good (though touchy at parts). All around a good feel to this game.

Fusion Time! By NeiloGD: A simple but solid arcade-type game where you fuse atoms in a sun.  Theres not much too it but the explosions and strategy of timing the fusing makes it surprisingly fun to play.

Honorable Mentions: Things under here are games that did very well in some areas but poorly in others, so they don’t really hit my “best of” list but they’re worth mentioning for other reasons.

Tiny Island Adventure By AdventureIslands: This game has EXCEPTIONAL artwork and is a fresh take on the theme.  Don’t get me wrong, I love this game, but unfortunately it has some pretty bad control issues and the levels were a bit uninteresting.  Kept it from being in my “top” overall  picks but still worth a look, and IMHO could very well take the gold for “graphics”

Gale Axile By free_napalm: This game has some very clever gameplay mechanics, and is EXTREMELY innovative. It was definitely a refreshing break from the zillion and first back-to-back “planet defender” game played.  While I like it and the mechanics are unique it unfortunately has a big problem for me…the outcome is so random and the gameplay is so tedious that it’s just not very fun as is…though with a little work post-compo it could be a VERY good game.

Green Invasion By Kableado: The art in this game is FANTASTIC to say the least, it really is great. Unfortunately…that’s all there is to it, as a game it’s incomplete, there’s absolutely no gameplay implemented, no real sound, no goal.

Predicament By orangepascal: Again, another game with very good artwork, if a little TOO pixelated making it sometimes hard to see.  It’s a somewhat innovative mini-advanture game.  Unfortunately though the controls can be a little frustrating and the lack of any sort of ambient sound took away from it somewhat.

Mayor vs Aliens By Sheep: Very innovative, very funny, easily one of the best takes on the theme I’ve seen. The gameplay is ok but not great, the controls are a little stiff, and it’s wayyy too easy, you can pretty much defend indefinitely since they always go straight up the middle after taking the dirt.

Mini-Worlds and Monocles By Zed: VERY good sound in this game, one of the best.  Aside from that not much to talk about…it’s not “bad” but it’s really just another in a long line of generic “pick up the coin, move to next level” platformers.  Not very innovative and the jump controls are pretty frustratingly bad.  Still worth mentioning for it’s audio and humor though.

The Good Ship Higgs Boson By Jezzamon: Easily one of the most fun entries in the entire compo. EXTREMELY fun gravity based platformer.  Honestly though, aside from the name, it doesnt really fit the theme at all, the graphics were nothing special, and the sound lacking.  It is VERY fun though and I suggest playing it, and I suggest to the author clean it up a bit and publish a full version of this game….I think it would do quite well!

Oh, and I suppose I should put this here too, as always, I would appreciate more reviews and feedback on my entry as well!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=7131

2. All game code and content must be created within the 48 hours. **

I’ve seen a few cases of added features and new art being added to games, PLEASE break those changes off into a post-compo version…it ain’t cool adding stuff while ratings are still going on.  Not going to call anyone out but you know who you are who’s doing this!

and…

If you can’t run this entry, please leave a comment saying so and explaining why. Do not score unrunnable entries.

I saw a twitter feed talking about rating games “1 star across the board” for not being web based…..seriously..not cool.

I’ll start with the part that’ll interest more people….now that I’ve rated 150 entries, here are my top 7! (in no particular order)

Bottlecolonies By tcstyle : A clever little strategy/puzzle  game, the art direction is great, the sound both fitting and awesome, and the gameplay itself is solid and complete…a joy to play

Nanofactory By JustinMullin: A solid puzzle game about a nanobot assembling widgets, a little hard and cryptic at first but the puzzles are both simple and clever

ANT SURF HERO: THE SURFENING By Jigxor:  A refreshing change from the massive number of dull uninspired platformers,  aside from a few physics issues it’s really fun,  and riding on top of the ant is amusing to say the least.

Housefly By dacap: You play as a fly on a mission: to get back outside!  It’s a short but very immersive adventure game with solid controls, great visuals and sound…its hard to describe but the flight control feels “right” for a fly. Very fun.

Recluse By chambers: You play as a snail with a neckbeard in a “metroidvania” type game….but with a twist.  Easy 5/5 for innovation personally, I don’t want to ruin it by the starting room is misleading and it quickly introduces one of the most unique gameplay mechanics i’ve ever seen. (even if it is mostly a gimmick…it fits the theme very well)

Hero of Rain By 31eee384: Extremely incomplete but what there is of it is very enjoyable, the story is both fitting and interesting, the gameplay is for the most part pretty good (though touchy at parts). All around a good feel to this game.

Fusion Time! By NeiloGD: A simple but solid arcade-type game where you fuse atoms in a sun.  Theres not much too it but the explosions and strategy of timing the fusing makes it surprisingly fun to play.

Please try these out if you havent! Most still have a pretty low number of ratings and could use some more love! Also, <shameless plug> I really wouldn’t mind a few more tests on my entry as well, it’ll be linked below with the timelapse and postmortem</shameless plug>

Post-Mortem:

First off, here’s the link, try it out yourself and let me know what you think!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=7131

I have to say…I had more fun with this theme than I would have thought, it was a lot easier to make a game that fit the theme but was still….you know…a GAME..than it was for “alone” (LD22)

What went right:

•  My game Idea! I came up with it MUCH faster this time and IMHO it’s a much more fun game than my 22 entry
•  My cross-compilers were already set up, saving me a lot of time testing the windows build
• Using my sprite editor (listed in the tools section to the right) I was able to do what little spriting I needed very quickly with decent results, it was MUCH easier than trying to do it in GIMP (great editor….not so good for animating)
• I planned fairly well what I would have time to do,  I was complete (though had to cut a few units) and able to submit before the rush.
• Deciding early to render with opengl instead of plain SDL was a good call,  I ended up abusing it quite a bit to scale/recolor graphics & text (SDL can do it but it’s so slow it would be near unplayable..).  Having recently written a LOT of OpenGL code also it was pretty fresh in my mind and I was able to painlessly get it up and rendering.

What went…welll…not quite as right:

• Once again, LD fell on a weekend I had to be gone quite a bit, I wasn’t home on saturday till nearly 6pm, so I lost a good 18 hours of copetition time there (seriously, i had NOTHING planned that couldn’t be moved for like.. a month prior and a month after…only that one day)
• I had to take care of some stuff outside friday and was EXHAUSTED after the theme was announced, ended up losing even more time by going to bed early. (though i did finish a opengl renderer + sound system before then)
• I had a OpenGL/SDL/Angelscript based game engine I’ve been working on for quite some time that I was going to use so I could concentrate more on game code….unfortunately I had some last minute issues and there was no way I’d get a windows build of the engine working in time, so I had to change plans and just write a renderer/sound/input engine from scratch during the competition.

And of course, here is the timelapse video! (with soothing music added)

All done…whew..got the music in just in time too.

Some gameplay footage

And rating page!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=7131

Too many porting bugs to work out in my engine before LD starts so I’m revising my “I’m in”..Instead of using an engine I’ll just do straight SDL/C++ again for simplicity’s sake.

Also, sorry to any Mac users who may have wanted to use my sprite editor (i did get a few questions on it)….I don’t have a MAC but i did try….but OSX keeps crashing on me in virtualbox and I dunno why :/

There wasn’t a whole lot of information about it around but I managed to piece together a quick script to do live streaming from a linux desktop.  It’s simple and for speed reasons I’m not broadcasting sound myself. (I get unrealiable levels of upload lag so if i add sound it’s kinda distorted…I really wish their streams allowed speex codec :/)

if you do want sound, you can change it to this for alsa

or for OSS

I’m in, this will be the 2nd LD i’ll actually be able to take part in at all, and the first one where I’ll actually be able to be here coding for more than half the compo! (last one was more of a LD16 for me…)

• Programming Language(s): C++ / Angelscript
• Development Platform: Gentoo Linux Kernel 3.2.11 AMD64 build
• Target Platform(s): Linux x86, Linux x86_64, Win32, also OSX if i can figure out how to cross compile to it in time.
• Engine/Basecode: Aether Engine (still finalizing, documentation and download will be up within a few days, just trying to get physics fully implemented…..I procrastinated too much ) Which is built on SDL, SDL_image, SDL_mixer, OpenGL, tinyxml, zlib, angelscript, and Box2D
• Code Tools: Code::blocks, gedit, gnu make, gcc, gdb
• Sound/Music:SFXR, LMMS
• Graphics: GIMP for high res graphics/backdrops, My aptly named “Sprite Editor” for pixel art
• Food: More than likely stuffed shells w/ arabiatta sauce and a side of asparagus
• Drink: Water, rockstar recovery, newcastle, or I’ll mix a martini…all depends on the situation

First, a rundown on what got me thinking of this idea….

I have no real complaints about how I scored in LD22, it was overall around where I expected, but one thing kinda stuck with me.   My actual scores were VERY inconsistant with all the feedback I received.  For instance I was pretty universally praised by all that commented (a fairly good number of people) on my community effort in doing a build for multiple platforms, a timelapse video, and even commenting my source, In the end I got a 3.2 score in that category which does not seem to reflect that (especially compared to the fact that many games that had no such things, and single platform were averaging a score of 3.5)  Quite a few people both in the comments and on IRC said the game was really fun!… I actually got no negative feedback at all on that….I scored a 2.66.  As you can see here I found it bizarre that the actual ratings were pretty much completely opposite of comments I had received.

My main point to this being, It would have been nice to know why those rating at a 1 out of 5 hated it so much, nobody seemed to want to leave any negative feedback (And I’m not just speaking for myself, a lot of other people had expressed the same confusion as to why their scores were opposite of what they would have expected from their comments), so perhaps it would be nice for 23 when we rate something it could have an anonymous comments box attached to each rating category where you have to quickly fill in the main “problem” or main “draw” as to why you’re rating a 1 or a 5?  In doing this it could actually help improve future games instead of pretty much just leaving everyone confused as to how the scoring worked after the compo is over.

Another thing I would like to see is more detailed instructions on each rating category, and a N/A rating for games that don’t use it at all (for stuff like humor…many people were rating games down overall due to humor scoring a 1 on games that were not supposed to be funny)

Also, add a “Does not run” button that removes a entry from your list of ones to rate but doesnt set a rating on it, I fear too many people were scoring games low that they simply couldn’t run and it was throwing off the statistics