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This is kind of difficult to respond to because on one hand, I appreciate you taking the time to write up everything that you did and I also agree with much of what you wrote, but on the other hand, I think you might’ve misunderstood some of what I was saying >.<

This post wasn’t written to whine as you put it, or garner sympathy, or elicit anything really. It was just a write-up of the process behind the project, an honest account of my feelings about the jam, and how it all impacted my mental health as a whole. I didn't even expect anyone to read it considering the length, let alone comment on it. If anything, it was more just like therapy for myself to get all the thoughts out of my head x3 And considering I'd never heard of RSD before my therapist mentioned it, I figured I might as well mention that too since it was relevant and, as it turns out, a common co-morbidity in neurodivergent people. 

It saddens me to know that you thought my write-up was something as shallow as whining when I was attempting to share some of my mental health experiences >.<

It’s something I’d been discussing with several different people who were also struggling with their mental health as a result of the jam, and we all agreed that the current system of judging doesn’t match up to how much prize money is involved or the sheer scale of the jam.

You don’t need to be real with me because I’m already aware of the things that you listed x3 That stuff haunts my brain enough as it is already, haha. When you don’t have all the details though, it makes parts of what you’ve written come across as somewhat insensitive. There are a few assumptions in there that are completely incorrect because you don’t have the full picture.

It’s hard to tell whether it’s my Britishness getting in the way again and causing misunderstandings x3 All I know is that the way you've interpreted parts of what I wrote are so far from what I meant or how I intended them to come across that it's almost as though we’re speaking two completely different languages >.<

I was just really surprised to see you mention stuff like entitlement because neither myself nor anyone I (anonymously) referenced in the post was ever asking for attention. We never expected anything from anyone. So I'm not sure how you arrived at that conclusion. 

It was just the united feeling that when so much money is involved, I don’t think it’s an unreasonable thing to hope for fair judging from the competition organisers/judging panel. And the observation that if something of that scale is judged in a way that some people's work is skipped over, that can lead to those participants feeling negatively in some capacity. 

We adore the overall concept of the jam. They were just honest accounts of people’s feelings, and some suggestions as to how it could potentially be improved overall. No one was asking for or expecting anything >.<

To elaborate on some of your points:

Regarding number 2, the scope and team shenanigans.

I didn’t put anyone through anything they didn't want to do. I still feel bad, especially for LPB, but everyone who worked on the game chose to be there, and everyone was given the opportunity to stop both prior to the jam starting and during. The programmer and I discussed the situation at length, and I took over to save her from having to work crazy hours. LPB only ended up overworking because things didn't go entirely to plan on the art side of things and she was determined to see the vision through.

We formed a team of 15 people. That team consisted of myself, an editor, a programmer, an audio engineer, 5 artists, and 6 voice actors. At one point, LPB even told me to stop looking for artists because she was worried we might accidentally end up with more people than we actually needed, and someone would wind up sitting around twiddling their thumbs with nothing to do. So we essentially recruited enough people to cover the scope. It’s just things happened here and there that meant it didn’t exactly go according to plan x3

And ours wasn’t even the biggest scope by a long shot. There were many projects submitted to the jam this year that had upwards of 20k words (won 1st place). Some were even 40k (won 2nd place), heck, I believe there was a 60k  submission, some of which were created by teams that were smaller than ours o.O It actually seems to have become the norm for this particular jam that people create longer games. There are even some huge teams with 20+ people. 

We were victims of circumstance and a degree of misfortune more so than we were of scope really >.< but I prefer to blame myself still because that's easier than just chalking stuff up to bad luck. The main thing is that we managed to make it through as a team.

Heck, some members of the team even chose to join more than one team for the jam (and that’s actually pretty common, especially with artists and VAs joining several teams), and I don’t have a problem with that at all. We had some planning and prep time and we discussed who wanted to take which parts of the game so everyone knew roughly what their workload would be before the active game-making part of the jam even began. So it was down to them to decide if they had enough free time that month to take on roles for multiple teams. That’s something which is completely out of my control.

I think in the end, I was one of the few people on the team who was only working on 1 project for the jam, haha. Some voice actors even joined 5 different teams to voice a multitude of characters. And some writers wrote for their own project + helped out with writing or programming for a different team. 

On your 3rd point regarding attention and reward.

I already touched on this a little, but I don’t really understand why you would even bring this up. No one on my team or any other person involved in the jam that I spoke to from other teams ever mentioned expecting attention, praise, reward, or compensation >.< 

None of us expected anything x3 It’s just some of us were hurt to discover that projects submitted to the jam weren’t being judged properly. I try to treat this jam in particular the same way I treat normal jams, but at the end of the day, it is still a competition.

It’s bound to have a negative impact on people’s mental health if they spend a month working on a game to discover that the judges of the competition only played like 5 minutes of it >.< As I said, how can you possibly judge cash prize categories like best voice actor if you only play the opening quarter of a game? 

That was all people were saying. That it hurt to know they submitted to a competition but their work wasn’t judged because of the flawed judging system currently in place.

No one was even blaming anyone. It was just an observation that with the current method of judging and so few judges VS a mountain of submissions, you can't cover everything. 

Coming to your 4th point. regarding the way the competition is run.

I’m again confused why you would bring up first-world problems when my post was just essentially an account of my feelings >.< I wasn’t asking for anything. I wasn’t expecting anything. It was just a post to say, this is the process of how the game was made, these are the things I felt during that process.

In regards to the judging part of the competition though, when sponsors have given them a total of $7500 in a mixture of cash and other kinds of prizes, you would just hope that there would be a unified and effective system for judging in place because that’s a lot of money. 

The judges had to go through so many games because there were over 200 games submitted, and the judging panel is tiny. The competition has grown immensely in recent years. All we were saying is that since there are high-profile sponsors like publishers involved, and more and more people joining teams to submit games to the jam, it would make sense to either start introducing some restrictions on content to make the judges’ lives easier, to have more judges recruited, or potentially even both.

The competition is only going to keep getting bigger, so it makes sense that the way it’s judged would evolve alongside that to better cope. And if that’s not possible, maybe it would be best to just restrict the prizes to 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place. Do away with the sub-category prizes if the judges don’t have the time to go through all the games to assess everyone’s voice acting or soundtracks and such in their entirety.

Like I said, I don’t have the answers x3 

And the competition creators already said they want to avoid public voting because it would result in things becoming a popularity contest, which is something I completely agree with. There just wouldn’t be a way to work that fairly. 

I’m not sure how much you know about this particular game jam in general, but it’s run by DevTalk. So all the rules, like the length of time for the jam, the themes, rules, and prize distribution is all handled by them.

I completely agree that the extreme amounts of work devs are doing for these jams isn’t healthy though >.< It's a painful trap to have fallen into, but if the games submitted this year and the conversations had on the Discord server are anything to go by, more and more people are overworking themselves. I lost track of the number of times I saw devs state that they hadn't slept :(

This year, it was even more evident than the previous 2. The first year I participated in Spooktober VN Jam, I was able to play all of the submissions myself (it was around 105, but there were an odd few that didn’t work). Last year, I managed to play 70 out of 156. This year, I only managed to play 50 to 1 ending, 45 to completion out of 210 entries.

The reason I didn’t get to play as many this year is because I came across several that took 4-5 hours to complete o.o

Teams are getting larger, and even the smaller teams are making absolutely HUGE games for the jam nowadays >.< That’s why I suggested the 5k word limit, because it is getting kinda crazy at this point, and people are working so unhealthily like it's just completely fine and normal :( 

The problem is, the more people do it, the more generally accepted it becomes. And then when it’s the norm, it’s even harder to escape it. The only thing that will make it stop is if the folks running the competition make it a rule not to create such gigantic games for the jam >.<

And again, I feel as though I should point out that I wasn’t whining about anything. Neither was anyone on my team. Nor was anyone I spoke to. It sucks if it somehow came across that way because that wasn’t at all my intention >.< Like I said, I dunno if it’s something to do with my Britishness and how we word things over here that’s led to that misunderstanding, but yeah. No whining here, haha. Just an honest account of feelings with absolutely no expectations.