Hello.
As a rookie (3 jam games is not much), I don't pretend being able to compare myself with experienced devs, artists or musicians. So ranking comes second.
What I consider most is the comments. They tell me how the game was received, what went right, what went wrong, what to improve. And I'm even happier when the comments are nice and constructive. Funny ones are great as well. 😊
The ranking sure is interesting. It gives a quick overview of how the game was on each category. We are not rewarded by rank in this jam, so I do take the rank into account, but not too much.
What I'm more worried about is to be compared to games more or less heavily developed with AI. They will probably look nicer (except slops), they will probably run better (if the code is reviewed), they will definitely draw more attention. I don't feel we play with the same rules.
Viewing post in How do you feel about your results?
Many jams have a rule against ai, they kick out entries made with ai or allow only miniscule use of it. Hopefully next time gamedev.tv also reconsiders it.
Also some jams like global jam require source code to be given, so the ai games will not pass likely, if the dev tried to conceal it for example.