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Suggestions to Improve Game Jams

A topic by StandOffSoftware created Jun 10, 2018 Views: 220 Replies: 1
Viewing posts 1 to 2
(+1)

It's getting fairly close to time for the Adventure Game Challenge (a few months away), so I will post these suggestions again. I was told last time to post them when it gets closer to when I will need them.

I will put them in the order of most importance.

1. Back Bin - This is an area in which games are put that are disqualified from the jam because they did not follow the rules. Many jam organizers, including myself, don't want to wantonly toss games out of the jam entirely if they failed to follow one or more rules, but they should be excluded from the primary ranking system. It is unacceptable to me that games that didn't follow the rules can be ranked higher than those that did, even if the rule-breaking games are technically "better" games. On the other hand, people did work hard on those games, and it doesn't seem completely in the spirit of a game jam to just toss them out.

2. Awards - Right now there is a rating system that ranks games by voting criteria, but you can't single out games for specific awards. Example of awards might be a "judges choice" award for each of the judges or "smallest file size" award or any number of things a game could be recognized for that makes no sense to be a judging criteria.

3. Multiple Voting Systems - Each game could receive a community vote and ALSO a vote by the judges that are counted separately from each other. Both systems have their good and bad points, so why not be able to have both.

4. Weighted Criteria - The jam organizer can weight the criteria as to how much they will contribute to the overall ranking. If a jam is very story-focused, the organizer will want to weight the "story" and "characters" criteria higher than "graphics" and "sound." This can be done by having a multiplier for each criteria that defaults to 1.

5. Custom pages - Be able to add pages to the jam that have separate tabs across the top. Right now the jams are all on one page and if you have a lot of info, the description gets quite long-winded. Jam organizers should be able to add other pages to categorize the content.

6. Manuel Ranking - An additional ranking system is added which can be enabled and then ranks are entered manually by the jam organizer. The organizer gives each game a rank by hand based on either his sole discretion or any other way of judging that takes place off the site such as in-person discussion with the panel of judges.

Admin(+2)

Hey, 

Thanks for creating this post. Since your last topic I don't think we've pushed out any changes to our jam system. I appreciate the reminder with plenty of notice. I'll keep you updated as I start working on stuff. Feel free to reply to this thread to check up.

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