Thanks for holding this again! I got a chance to make a proper game with a team after I didn't have as much time for it last year. There were a lot more submissions this year, looking forward to checking out more of them and seeing them on stream!
For next year, I don't know if there's a way to make it so the game ratings aren't adjusted on a curve, because it feels like my game got punished hard by not as many people rating it. The raw score I got from people who played and the judges was actually really good, but after it was "adjusted" by the average number of ratings it went way down. Maybe make it so only the judge ratings count in the final score so it isn't weighed off of one game getting 35 ratings and another getting 10? Just a thought, I know it's all just for fun anyway!
Huh... I was reading the scores backwards until coming across your post. It seems we are in the same boat. I was under the impression that the judges/curators were doing their own thing as far as picking games for the packs, and that Vinny's winners are entirely separate from the jam scores.
As far as jam scores go, in our case, I think the biggest mistake was uploading a busted web build instead of just going with the Windows & Mac builds. Lesson learned for next time!
You're right, ultimately the judges do pick whatever they want to send Vinny, and Vinny has no idea about the itch.io scores. It just kinda peeves me seeing the way the automated scores are handled because it makes my game much harder to find on itch.io itself even if it scored well from the people who played it (unless you sort by audio, in which case we're on page 2). Thankfully, the judges seem to include a couple of the lower ranked games in the packs instead of just the high ranking ones, so it hopefully may still get shown on stream. 🤞
I made a similar mistake, I think more people would've played and rated ours if I had been able to make a web build. Unfortunately, I wanted to try Unity's HD renderer, and found out too late it can't publish to WebGL, so I would've had to rebuild all of the graphics and shaders to do that.