Hi all!

Not to be picky, but in addition to finally getting the incentive to finish my own game, I was looking forward to playing actual finished (albeit small) games from other people. After playing through some entries in this jam it seems to be a lot of "I'll finish this later"-mentality. In my humble opinion, learning to finish something, release it and walk away from it and onto the next ting is part of the creative experience and is something that we all should practice in order to get better.

Don't know if you all agree with me?

Haven't got the time to check out many games but I think I know what you mean. Well, I hope my game feels complete enough, haha. On the other hand, everyone needs to evaluate their own goals. Throughout development of my game, I was asking myself is this the whole thing? Is this feature complete? And I would love to add more stuff and continue working on polishing little details etc. but there is a point where you have to say stop, I'm satisfied, ship it, and move on. As for me, I'm pretty happy that I managed to really go back to my project and wrap it up within a month. Having it very half-baked on my hard drive was driving me nuts.

All in all game jams can teach you a lot of stuff about how to manage your time, priorities, how development under pressure feels like. I hope as much people learned some good lessons on this. Doing games is fun, but finishing them is a real struggle.

A lot of these are toys or little beginner projects, so I try to have some leniency...  Though I agree, it's sometimes a slog digging through some of the stuff to find the games with a little more put into them.  Don't like to judge too many by their cover, but I also don't have time to play 100 games. D:

It is called finally finish "something".  Maybe you should let the developer(s) know what they should do to make it a complete work, it that's something they're interested in. 

Agreed,some of the game I played looks like a prototype only

syntax bomb
evade
a birdman emulator
nomad z
larvis
explosive recycling corp

these are the ones so far that ive seen that are really complete and good.

As far as my side of things, my game is a prototype really, but I am definitely not walking away from it. I'm trying to actively work on it, and plan on adding a lot more as time goes on. I just didn't have enough time to finish it in one month.

As long as it is a finished prototype, I believe it's valid; but I will certainly judge it against the merits of a prototype in comparison to a completed game, the effort I expect from a jam of this length and the quality of other entries. I also tend to take into consideration the tool and what would it allow the creator to do and how long before the deadline it was submitted.

To sum it all - I like to recognize effort; if I reward lazy entries, there is no incentive for others to grow.

Hope this doesn't feel too harsh (what can I do - I'm an old fart... "now, get off my lawn, damn kids!")

I think the real question is "what am I finishing". In my case, I was finishing a feature submission to an open source game engine for review. That's not the same as a finished feature, but it is finished in the sense of completing what I set out to do during the month. Though I do get your point, and I think that's the real intent of the jam. It's what we should strive for, but different people have different goals, and the keyword for me in Finally Finish Something was the "Something" part.