Game Submissions now open

[Jebbs]

With about 10 hours to go, game submissions are now open!

Hope everyone is still sane! I can't wait to see the games.

[select_this]

Alas, I shall not be submitting my entry. As I suspected, my family got in the way

I really do like my idea though so I'll probably be running with it and seeing where it goes anyway.

[Veritas]

Nice! By the way the ChromoShift download links are broken.

[Nexus]

Has there only been one participant?

A Windows binary for ChromoShift would really be nice
I wanted to build it from source, but there seem to be a lot of dependencies (through Featherkit) necessary to set up first...

[arbitergoten]

I'm still not done

[Geheim]

I thought you only have 72 hours, and that ended yesterday?
Is this one game really the only one? And no working download link :/
Unfortunately I hadn't much time to make something presentable and the theme was not my cup of tea either.
This jam seems quite chaotic so far

[Lo-X]

Like others I couldn't finish mine. I think we should resume discussions about doing the jam over a week

[Nexus]

Last time it went quite well... but the games receive little to no attention, which may also be a demotivating factor.

This is a pity, I've tried many of the games of the 2nd jam and really liked the diversity. Maybe the games should be made more accessible, with a single download link containing all the binaries, and ideally both Windows and Linux builds.

[Grimshaw]

Next time we totally should advertise more : ) (and a better theme)

[thomas9459]

I also feel that the jam came at a bad time: I was unable to participate because of end-of-the-school-year events. And as others stated, the theme did seem pretty weak. Compare it to a theme like "cold": the latter could be implemented many different ways because it is an anesthetic theme, whereas "puzzle" is a mechanic and naturally limits the kinds of games one can make with the theme.

[select_this]

Enough people voted for 'puzzle' for it to be chosen as the theme (although it only won out on a coin toss); perhaps there should be a stricter vetting process on theme suggestions?

EDIT: Jebbs, I know you were trying to be as fair as possible, but maybe next time if there's a toss up you could make an executive decision on which theme would produce the best output in the event of a tie. I don't think too many people are going to mind (and if they do, tough! )

For the record, my suggestions were 'peaceful' (violence is bad, kids) and 'water' (because I was struggling to think of a second theme and had a glass of water nearby...)

[Grimshaw]

I think because puzzle is a game genre, its not really fit to also be a theme. Otherwise you could say the theme is RPG, or sport game, and those aren't themes either and I think we all agree..

[binary1248]

Considering there were almost as many theme submissions as people submitting them, finding a consensus with only a single round of voting doesn't work. Maybe next time there should be multiple rounds of voting so that trends can be followed and we don't end up with 4 people who actively voted for the selected theme whereas 90% of the other voters are left thinking: "If I had voted for that second place theme...". They already do so in politics since you wouldn't want 95% of the population rioting because the candidate that reached 5% of the votes wins . Either multiple rounds, or if that would consume too much time, let the voters select multiple themes and prioritize them according to their preferences. That way the case of a theme that the majority of the voters completely hated being selected will be avoided.

There is enough information about voting on Wikipedia, so I won't bother explaining why I find the current system is sub-optimal .

[select_this]

you wouldn't want 95% of the population rioting because the candidate that reached 5% of the votes wins .

That wouldn't happen in Britain. We'd just moan about it repeatedly until the next vote.

[wintertime]

I think people get deterred from your contest, because of some small but important things:
- There are many announcements, but most, not even the pinned thread contain no link to the contest website. People wont search everywhere for the URL.
- If people took the effort to search the whole forum for a link they cant read anything without having to register. While waiting for more theme suggestions there could be a list of already gotten suggestions to show activity. While the voting is going on you could show the list for all visitors and only require login for actually voting.
- There should be dates on the website for each step and possibly a countdown timer.