I had pretty minimal time available around work and family - maybe 6-8 hours dev time, total. I came up with Serious & Precise International Navigation, and these are the ratings:
Going through the categories:
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Creativity & theme: I didn’t think it was particularly creative at all. I guess the theme is pretty strong, being the only game mechanic and all, but still very surprised to be placed #240 (works out to the top 7% or so) on that.
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seriousness: admittedly I have no idea how people are interpreting this. Personally I think I just gave 5 stars to everything as a well-done for taking it seriously enough to get something submission-ready.
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audio: it’s not that I think the audio’s great (it isn’t), but after seeing so many game jam (including most of mine, historically) submissions down the years with literally no audio I personally have a tendency to be pretty generous and not go below 3 stars for anything where the devs made the effort to actually put in some audio. I know I can’t expect everybody to have that policy, but I was a bit disappointed by the score of 2.85. I’m actually quite happy with the music given that it was <30 mins in GarageBand. There is a little bit of a joke in the music and nobody’s mentioned it in the comments. I can’t tell if that’s because I was too subtle and nobody noticed, or it just didn’t seem interesting enough to mention. I’ll award 100 Hound Points* to whoever identifies it first.
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visuals: 3 stars, I think that’s fair enough. Minimal visuals and they’re nothing special. Default Godot fonts, a background texture I drew in 5 minutes in GIMP. It would have been easy to take some public domain space and earth images and use those but I wanted everything to be my own, so a json defining the country border definitions was the only external thing I used (other than the engine!). I quite like my cartoony filling-in of the Earth, although with more time I’d definitely have liked to fix the seam on the texture. The ship doesn’t really fit, it’s just a pre-existing asset I made for another (so far unreleased) project I’m working on.
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enjoyment: There are a few things I’d like to have added with more time: boost/brake functions (maybe as limited-use powers) to give some chance to adjust your misjudged spins, a target country highlight. If I were starting again I’d probably implement the rolling controls differently, too. The idea was that the ‘speed’ version feels more like you’re actually using the mouse to spin the planet, more of a physical interaction. But in practice it’s very fiddly if you’re aiming for a short roll. Maybe that could also be solved by just adjusting the drag-speed<->spin-speed relationship, but ultimately I think the simpler option (drag an arrow and set spin speed by the length of the arrow) would probably have been more satisfying. With all of those things I think there’s a game in there that could get much better than 2.8 for enjoyment, but I didn’t find the time and the actual submission (while it can be kinda fun) is often a bit frustrating to play.
So in summary: positively surprised by score in one category, moderately disappointed by score in another, entirely uncertain how to interpret a third. The other two.. probably about right.
* Hound Points have no cash value and cannot be redeemed for prizes