Your puzzles were pretty amazing to be honest.

Top 10 can request judge comments by email. We aren't releasing them publicly this year.

What game was it?

Eh, there were just a lot of RPGs in the contest. Not only that, of the ones I've played in the top 10 so far, only 1 is an RPG. There are adventure games, a metroidvania, and a visual novel all in there too.

Dun Dun DUUUUUUUN. So we've finished our first rounds of judging, and we have whittled down the massive amount of entries to 10 possible winners.

This top 10 will be what the judges will pick from for the Degica's Choice Winner, as well as what our guest Youtuber Judge will be selecting from. So anyone in this list is still in the race.

First though, for everyone who isn't on this list: That doesn't mean you failed. Every game that was finished is an accomplishment. Continue to believe in yourself, and work hard to make an even better game next time!

So, without further ado, our top 10 (in no particular order)

Izel's Observatory by finalbossblues
Abyss of Oblivion by hadecynn
Kryopolis by Shweep
Dia:Dol - Diamond Idol by MakioKuta
Everbloom by HikaruRen
Kiara by Ruskatuli
DEX: Strange Residence by Uzuki
Fading Remnants by LazyBumStudioFading Remnants by LazyBumStudio
Circuit by Cosmic Latte
nec[H]roma by OndeadGames

Congratulations to our top 10, and congratulations to everyone who entered the contest!

Our Judges are taking a quick break for New Years Holiday, but will be right back to work soon. Expect to hear the full results by the end of January!

We tossed a lot of questionable votes. In the end, the winner was pretty clear though. Can there still be some vagaries in the rankings further down. Yeah, with some of the close titles absolutely. But for the top 1-5 games we are pretty certain.

What miracleJester said

I'm impressed with anyone that finishes something. Literally no matter what you did good.

Ratings will be weighted for People's Choice so that getting a lot of good votes is more valuable than perfect score with few votes, and perfect score with few votes is worth more than bad score with lots of votes.

Basically we're going to do something that will drag all ratings towards 2.5, but the more votes there are, the less it will move

Let's wait until the end of judging and such first. Since part of the winning is a publishing deal with us.

I'll be honest, I've thought of the People's Choice as a marketing award from the beginning. But being good at marketing is its own skill, and one I suggest that indie game designers who want to make commercial games learn to some degree or another.

It will be weighted. Basically we'll be doing something that causes all game ratings to be pulled slightly towards 2.5, but the more votes the game has, the less it will get pulled. So a game with 50 ratings will more than likely stay pretty close to the rating it has, where as one with 10 ratings would probably move farther.

I've been a judge for every IGMC except last years, and I just have to say that the field is a lot better than I feel it has ever been.

While I won't claim the top games are as good as previous years yet (haven't done in depth reviews yet, just finished screening), based on screening, I'd say that the floor, the quality of the worst games in the contest, is way higher than it has been in years past.

In the first two IGMCs for instance, roughly 50% of all entries ended up not making it past screening, either from not starting, missing download, or being ridiculously bad to the point of being unable to play for 5 full minutes without pain.

This year, 80+% of the games I screened passed screening, and the ones that didn't were due to  being unable to start. Not a single game got screened out in my set for being just bad.

Just wanted to give a quick shoutout to how much the competition has improved!

Our Guest Youtube Judge NicoB will pick his favorite from the top 10

I'll admit that I have not submitted any games to itch.io game jams before. How did the submission process for IGMC differ?

There will not be 2nd and 3rd place prizes this year. We will announce them though.

It isn't based on average rating. We'll be using a weighted rating that will benefit games that get a high amount of high ratings.

It's been in since the beginning and people enjoy it. It also provides marketing for the contest as a whole. We've thought about getting rid of it, but people like voting for their favorites.

And again, I did not say there is no way to check, I said there is no FOOLPROOF way to check. Any voting system will be able to be cheated without some form of voter registration tied to some kind of real life government documentation, the best way to catch people though is not to discuss how you can catch them.

This. We can't be responsible for checking every single entry that people claim they put through but didn't go through. It is up to the submitter to familiarize themselves with the system and leave themselves plenty of time to submit in case of errors.

The deadline is a hard deadline for a reason.

Yes, you can edit the gamepage. Just don't touch your game files (as if you delete them you cannot reupload them.)

Thanks, will go through them.
And yeah, I noticed the Emerek ones.

Absolutely not. You can promote your game as much as you want. You can even ask people to rate it honestly after playing, you just can't ask people to just rate it 5 stars without playing it.

Itch has protections set in place, checking ips and such, and we'll definitely look for any odd results (can't go into details on what constitutes odd since that gives people who want to cheat more ideas of what to avoid doing), but the truth is that almost no form of public voting online is foolproof unfortunately. So it is what it is. But we are attempting to curtail it as much as we can.

Updating the page is fine (as long as the itch ui will let you with submissions closed, I'm not sure how that part works), as long as the entry itself is not changed.

Fine, good, no problem, etc, etc.

People's choice voting will just be thumbs up voting, iirc.

Voting for people's choice starts soon after the submission period ends and will be closed when we announce the top 10 which should be near the end of December (we don't want placement in the top 10 by the judges to influence voting).

That will be fine.

As long as we can start it up and play it and you have the rights to use everything you are using we don't care how you package it.

If all goes well, we'll be announcing top 10 end of December, and the winners announced by Mid to late January.

More than likely we will be sending the ratings to the person who entered the game. We've never really bothered with making them public though.

As long as the person submitting the entry owns the resource pack its good.

The 1 hour playtime rule is mostly there just so that we have a hard cap on how long a judge has to spend on any one game. The overall length of the game won't be a factor in the judging other than 1. Judges aren't required to play longer than one hour, and 2. You have communicated what you want to with  your game. If it is 30 minutes and you communicated the game to us, you're fine. 

Shouldn't be an issue as long as the laws of your country don't disallow it.

It isn't ideal but I think we can manage.

You have to have the rights to use the music.

No need to add any credits for it, the only stipulation is that it can only be used in a 2018 IGMC entry.