I have 18 unrated Game Jam entries, two of which I've been anticipating giving a 5 star to, but my queue stopped refreshing. What gives?
This is likely because you selected a “Preferred Platform”. Unfortunately, preferred platform is a system that only makes sense for video games that are built to run on a specific operating system. For tabletop games, most entries have no platform set, so you inadvertently filtered out the majority of the submissions.
We’ve added the ability to reset your preferred platform, please do so here: https://itch.io/jam/shadowdark-independent-game-jam/unrated
You should then be able to access the remaining submissions in the jam
I'll be honest, personally I just wanted to make my judgements and get through as many as I could. When I'm doing that much reading I run out of the mental bandwidth to leave genuine feedback. I had plenty of good and bad to say but I opted to keep it all to myself. That said if anyone asked my opinion on any specific entry I'd have an answer for sure.
And yeah the system was kinda tedious but I get why it is the way it is. Some potential improvements aside, I think it's fair, hence why I tried to rate what I could
NO! Mine was one you didn't have anything nice to say. *sulks*
Actually, it's interesting that this is your list, because this is literally the list of things I was asked to rate and review first. I didn't get the chance to comment though. I was trying to rate as much as I could first before coming back to comment and never got to finish. So many entries.
Actually, a lot of your suggestions I cut because of the page limit. I was really trying to keep it within the 8 page limit. Sort of failed in that it was 9 with the cover, c'est la vie. So I dropped the Moon Maiden resurrection in favor of the 4 characters per player rules from Shadowdark. Then, I took out the things that I thought the GMs might handle differently themselves simply because it was a gauntlet adventure and is designed to lead into their world and I don't know what their world is. So if their mushrooms weren't colored to denote something, or they didn't have a Moon Maiden, I didn't want to go too in-depth on their world-building. I'll probably add those back in as I flesh it out more fully though and toss it onto the adventure that comes from it.
The Japanese should say "kumo no su": spider web. (I say should because google translate rather than asking someone directly because I don't know anyone who speaks japanese.) It's the name of my main city once people exit the Underdark.
It's more insider baseball for me than anyone else, because I run my drow using a lot of Japanese historical/cultural references because the majority of matriarchal societies that currently exist are asian in some manner. So I took the strong patriarchal hierarchy Japan has (because it's a more common frame of reference) and applied the matriarchal anthropology of the various asian tribes (ostracizing of men in their societies, cruelties, etc.) over top of it. It's a decent corollary. Things such as the emperor is a religious being (drow priestesses & empress), dark history from the feudal period correlates with some of the drow' history, yokai and body horror are more alien conceptually for westerners than the traditional god ethos, because it doesn't make sense that Lolth would allow the knowledge of the existence of other gods. She barely acknowledges her own children. But yokai and oni make sense as spirits. Spirits can be tortured or be used to torture her people. And so on. Totally works in my head, so it's my shorthand for myself until I finish making a language or something.