Congratulations to all of you.

It was my first gamejam and maybe the last one I want to do.

Some projects with less than 10 reviews ranked in the top 10 while projects with 50 to 120 reviews that spent the entire week rating in the top 10 for popularity, most reviews, and most rated, had final ratings of 100 and above.

I'm not sad about my specific result, but i will use mine and 1 other as example. 

  Cosmic Voyager(Mine):

• Popularity: #5
• Most Rated: #9 (47 Rates)
• Comments: 55

 - Final Result : #120

Corpse Colector:

• Popularity: #2
• Most Rated: #2 (98 Rates)
• Comments: 65

 - Final Result : #55

And now im sorry about refering to the first place but it is just an example.

Enchanted Realms:

• Popularity: #248
• Most Rated: #247 (98 Rates)
• Comments: 6

 - Final Result : #1

It would be possible to do the following:

1. Enter gamejam with an unfinished game that doesn't draw attention.
2. Ask 1 friend to join gamejam alone. after finishing the game development time, invite 9 people to be part of that friend's team.
3. At the last minute of the 7-day review, these 10 people voted 5 stars for everything in my game.

I'm not sad about my specific result, and I'm not accusing anyone of having done this, but these types of assessments are not fair at all.
Some may agree or disagree.

Thank you to everyone who read the rant to the end ahah

Unfortunately this is how game jams tend to go. Often some very polished submissions go unnoticed, for example Inventory the Hero, which is now trending on itch, was a submission to GMTK2023, but didn't rank very high. 

The main thing to take away from the game jam is how YOU improved. The ranking system is intended for peoples games to be seen by others, and not ignored, and it is very difficult to fairly rate all entries, as there are a lot and a lot of it is down to personal opinion. 

I also have found that there can be 'revenge rating' where some people deliberately sabotage ratings on people's games if the person rating has left feedback that the developer does not agree with, particularly on games that have not had as much work put into them and/or newer developers. Again, this is not in the spirit of the game jam. 

In an ideal world, I would love for all entries to be judged by a panel of unbiased judges, but unfortunately unless it is a very small game jam or the host is willing to find a team of volunteers this is impossible. Even the GMTK approach, where the top rated 100 entries are played by the host and then the top 20 chosen, misses out on some good submissions as I mentioned above.

I agree with you that if the ratings system is to be done fairly, there needs to be a lot of changes. However, I have found that it is better to ignore the ratings and focus on your own submission. Are you happy with it? Did you learn anything? What could you improve for next time? 

Try not to be disheartened by your rating. I hope you'll submit again to another game jam in future!

Edit: If it's any consolation, I really enjoyed playing your submission, and I think it would be a good game to continue working on and maybe publish on mobile devices one day. A lot of popular games on Itch.io and Steam began as game jam projects!

It was my first game jam, and personally, I was also very surprised by the results. 

My game was in the top 30 for popularity, but I ended up at the 155th position as the final result, with a total of 37 ratings. 

I'm not sure if having so many ratings can be negative in the end... 

Anyway, it was a wonderful experience, and I will study how the games in the top 10 managed to achieve their success so that I can do better next time. 

Making games for game jams is definitely a world of its own that needs to be studied, with very distinctive and unique characteristics.