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Feedback For Everyone BROWSER GAMES

A topic by lrdazrl created Jun 01, 2022 Views: 302 Replies: 11
Viewing posts 1 to 5
Submitted (5 edits)

TL;DR: Give feedback to games made by others to get feedback about your game. Please read the RULES before participating.
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I can see that many jammers have put up rating exchange topics. And that's okay. Ratings are nice. But what I believe is even better is written  feedback. Still there is isn't always comments given for all the games and when they are they are often very short.

It is both really useful as a learning experience to hear what others think about your creation and rewarding to see that others have tried the game you worked hard for. It is easy way to make each other happy&motivated or help them for future projects by sharing constructive(!) criticism. I'm calling for everyone interested to join in community effort to give everyone a chance for their work to be noticed with quality feedback. And by doing so, you will get feedback from others in return.


RULES

Requirements for participations:

  1. You have a submission that is playable on browser. (If you instead have Windows game, please go hereinstead)
  2. You have not yet played the game linked in the the current latest comment. (If you have played it already, please wait for someone else to link their game first so everyone will get new players!)

Do the following 3 steps to participate:

  1. Post link to your game as a comment to this topic.
  2. Play, rate and comment (in the rating page of the game!) the game linked in the previous comment.
  3. Wait for the next person to comment to this topic and then do step 2 for that game too.

You are free to repeat above steps as many times as you would like if you want more feedback.


HOW TO GIVE GOOD FEEDBACK?

  1. What were the best 1-3 parts of the game?
    1. Why was it cool or why did you enjoyed it?
    2. They don't really have to be "the best" parts but something that you think is worth mentioning. It can be something general (like the art style) or something very specific ("that one tree on the background of the last section in level 2").
    3. Even if you don't like a game in general there should always be some nice part of the game or something that you considered better than the other parts.
    4. Positive feedback is meant to reward the game creator for their work, tell them what they did well, and motivate continue creating games!
  2. What would be the top 1-3 things to improve?
    1. Remember to be constructive! Don't say things like: "Your character controller is trash". Instead tell how they could improve/fix the thing you are commenting about:  "I think the game would be more fun if the character could move faster." / "When I was learning programming character control this one tutorial helped me a lot: [link]" / "I noticed a bug that the character can sometimes jump second time. It happened to me usually when I was nearby a wall."
    2. Constructive criticism is meant for the game creator to learn&improve or let them no about an issue they did not know they game had.
Submitted

I will post my game link here to get this started: https://itch.io/jam/gamedevtv-jam-2022/rate/1554340.

The next commenter should start by playing this. And I will then play their game in exchange.

Submitted(+1)

Sure I'll go. Really liked your game. In particular I liked that the different past versions of your character are color coded. I played a game with a similar mechanic to yours but all versions of the character looked the same so I found it impossible to figure out what way going on.

One thing to change, and it's a minor one, in the second to last level I found jumping to the button on the platform is just a bit harder than it should be. I think it needs to be just a tiny bit lower.

Here's my game: https://itch.io/jam/gamedevtv-jam-2022/rate/1553539

Submitted (3 edits)

Thanks for the feedback! I will be playing your game next!

To keep this topic page as clean as possible (so it's easy to find the links) I would suggest everyone to leave comments on the rating page of the game. You can keep this one here as you already posted it though. No worries. I'll try to write this more clearly to the rules.

Submitted

Why limit it to only browser ones and cross platform? That excludes a great many of people who are just starting out and is very discouraging to first time jammers. If you want this to be a good community perhaps you should focus more on inclusion and less on exclusion. Just my 2 cents.

Submitted (1 edit)

That's a good point. This certainty is not about trying to exclude people on purpose. I actually tried to think of a ways to make the system as fair as possible. Here are some solutions that I thought about and why I felt they would not work:

1. Solution idea: any game type can be submitted. Problem: someone cannot participate because the last person has linux (just random example of rare platform) game and they do have linux machine to test the game with. In worst case this could block the whole system from proceeding if no tester comes who would have linux.
2. Solution idea: any game type can be submitted but if you cannot test certain game you are allowed to skip testing it. Problem: someone puts their link in and reviews 2 games but neither person will review them back because neither of them do not have a linux (again, nothing against linux it was just my running example).  I fear that this would be even crueler fate than just being upfront told that not all games can be promised testing.
3. Solution idea: only web games allowed. Problem: What about people with non web games? But adding them leads back to the situations 1 and 2.

In the end I went with solution 4: only web or cross platform games. My idea was that it would be the most clear division without having other issues than that it unfortunately excludes some people.

I would like this to be as including as possible, so if you have other ideas to think about I would be happy to hear suggestions. Otherwise, at least one new solution idea that I thought about now that you brought this up would be to just setup different topics for each major platform. And then Windows game creators could review each others game in one topic and linux game creators could review each others game in another topic. Would you feel that it would work as a solution? I could setup something like that if you like.

Submitted

Okay, I just went and created another one for Windows specifically. If you are interested to join, please find the post here: https://itch.io/jam/gamedevtv-jam-2022/topic/2148162/feedback-for-everyone-windo.... We can just add new chains for other platforms if the need arises.

Submitted

I have said this in a couple other posts, but you don't need to create a link to your game, you can click the "submitted" icon next to the another's profile name and it leads to the same page. It isn't necessary but I bring it up because it is a bit more convenient than bringing the link

Submitted (1 edit)

It might be easier in many circumstances actually. You are right in that. Thought here I would say it might make it easier to see what comments are discussion and what comments are participations. If everyone who participate adds a link in their message it is much easier to see because links are displayed distinctively from normal text.

For example, I'm not sure now whether you just came here to comment this to help or did you want to participate and explained why you did not post a link? 

Submitted(+1)

I guess that is true, my thought is that you could maybe promote your game a bit better. You make a good point, but my view is that when I see a link, that is all I see. My eyes go straight to the link first, so sometimes I might miss something important. I guess that is more of a me thing but that was how I looked at it. That being said, you are right because I did only come here to really post that, but I don't mind putting my game here. So yeah I will do a link then https://itch.io/jam/gamedevtv-jam-2022/rate/1548095

Submitted (1 edit)

Well, in my mind this post was supposed be full of messages with mostly only the links. I didn't think they would need promoting as the point is to just play the 2 games assigned to you. And then it would be really easy to see what is the  previous game and what is the next game. But well... now I'm again writing here once more about general discussion topics so I cannot blame others either...

I would still like to just check that did you read the rules? So if you want to participate you should play & give feedback to the latest game before you (that would be Max Frymark's game) and then the next game after you (who ever will be the next one to comment their game here).

Submitted (1 edit) (+1)

I did, I did not look much at the how to give good feedback. I think I looked before I posted in the first place, I don't remember exactly, but I looked at Frymark's game, it was really cool too. I also plan on playing other games that get posted here regardless of the one before and after me anyways.