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The judges post feedback on the awfuljams site.
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Aug 6, 2017 17:47
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TomR posted:The judges post feedback on the awfuljams site. But just the judges though. And I think they're likely to repeat what they've said on the gong show.
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Aug 6, 2017 17:53
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Just took a look at what was said about my game, Smash-em Randal, on the gong show; yeah that's about the reaction I was expecting to hear. Still, I am encouraged to get better in both skill and work habits so I can really knock it out of the park in the next jam! I'll get around to playing the other games and write up a postmortem of my own in a few days, just a tad bit busy with a couple other things at the moment.
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Aug 6, 2017 17:53
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I've some more game thinks: Bat-Man and the Sacred Stones What a neat, enjoyable little package. This game is full of funny moments, it has varied enemies, good music selection and art. The web slinging mechanic is really tight and feels great. There are secret areas, or at least areas one wouldn’t think to go looking for hidden around the place. It’s so cool! Mashing up Batman, Spiderman and Superman is a great idea and fits the theme so well. The bosses are also well done, tight like early megaman bosses with patterns to learn. poo poo. So good. The only negative component to this game is the respawning on death during a boss fight. While I was fighting croc I was holding space and up, and died. When I respawned I pulled myself right into the spikes on the left side of the screen. This is a good game. Good job!   Kurm Frog Teach ABC This game is beautiful. The music is also appropriately adorable. It’s funny and fresh and attention grabbing. During the applause I could hear the Kermit scream in my mind, and when it finished I managed to get hit by a vegetable after the text came up and it was interrupted and skipped. I thought that fit really nicely, like it was realistic or something. Some of the gameplay mechanics are a little unbalanced or wonky though. The camera is a little tight around the Mathletic Race thing and final encounter. I don’t remember if it’s possible to skip/miss the second Mupet Show applause section, but it was really suprisingly difficult. Those small veggies come at you so fast that it’s very difficult to avoid them. It took me a couple minutes! Minutes! Very good writing, it was a treat to read through this game. So many wonderful aspects to it! Well done!  Merioz 20: To the land of flying and to flowers Well you already got your readme called out for that post morty, so I’m looking forward to it. It’s fun to gently caress around with Mario, flipping around, tossing a hundred fireballs all over the place, being able to jump off the sides of blocks or even the debris from broken blocks mid-air. There’s something to this concept for sure. The audio is a little disappointing, but I get where you’re coming from with it. Maybe you could have relied more on instruments rather than your voice, or at least chosen to record the audio a little more clearly. I think the idea was that it’s bootleg-y so the audio should be too, but it gets a little grating/boring. The lack of other sound effects is also a little let down. Having audio interrupt other audio could alleviate some of the more creative problems that arise with the mechanics of this game and/or any worry of overuse of your voice at one time in-game. Another cool thing would have been to use some like, home made type instruments. Paper in a comb harmonica, or some kind of janky-rear end marimba, I don’t know. It’s a cool space to play around in though. Nice!  Thriftynauts The idea for this game is pretty neat, I’m into the idea of scavenging parts off of enemies to build yourself up. If you had more time it would really have served well to work on the balancing of some of the mechanics. For the first 12 minutes any wings I found were needed for recipes, so turning was just molasses and I ended up setting up shop on top of the base and watching the minimap to pre-spin towards the enemies. I read the readme and saw that Brakes are meant to help make tight turns, but it seems their functionality is also tied to your momentum, and if you’re stopped, they don’t function (or I was just so full of poo poo it didn’t help enough  ). The other main issue is that it’s very difficult to choose not to take on junk when you really don’t want it. The things I mentioned previously led me into having a wildly sprawling ship and so when I managed to finally kill something, they were almost definitely on top of some part of my ship and I took on whatever they dropped.The enemy variety is good design. Stabby ships, pushy ships, normalish ships, they fit nicely and make use of the physics in a cool way, though perhaps spawning the different varieties earlier would be better so people get more of a chance to see what’s in store. The music is nice and space-trucky, and the concept for mouth sounds isn’t terrible, but it all multiplies and also makes the talking-bits from the base hard to hear and mixed up. If it were possible to duck other audio groups or something to give the speech more clarity that’d be cool. Also the explanations of items on your game page/readme would be more useful in the game itself, as the Tips screen is a bit hard to read due to thickness of the brush. There's something in here!   Angry Minion Bird and Shrek My brother watched me play this one and asked “Mannekin Piss?” when it booted up. I said “Yup” and played for a while. A few minutes later we were both laughing out loud and he exclaimed “I loving love this game”. The main game is fun enough, though easy to cheese, and I decided at the time of my playthrough not to beat the high score (especially because it would have taken so long) but even when I tried to fail I almost didn’t. The ending is just insane and I loved it. Like IJ said on the stream, that tongue was pretty interesting. Unfortunately the leaderboard seems to be down? I'll always have this to remember Not In My Hakusho, at least. I look forward to your stuff every jam! 
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Aug 6, 2017 19:01
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Thanks for the thoughtful words! I definitely failed in that I thought I addressed those potential complaints, but obviously not well enough that end-users know about them. Intentions in bold:Giggs posted:Thriftynauts So the takeaway that I really need to keep taking away is make everything obvious. The tricky part is making things obvious without forcing it down the player's throat -- I'm still of the opinion that forced tutorials are a bad idea. One just needs to cleverly design the early gameplay such that everything important is demonstrated in an engaging way.
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Aug 6, 2017 20:05
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Doom Goon posted:Own goals, bad teammates, running out of boost in the pockets. Yep, that's Rocket League! Quick, frantic little game that mixes that and Micro Machines. A bit claustrophobic and kick-offs seemed a bit too crucial, but it definitely got that adrenaline running! Bonus points for having a really nice Progress Log on the jam page already! one thing i want to do post-jam is work on the AI, but the way they are right now does feel so much like playing with randos in Rocket League. they're either charging at the ball or they're running back to the goal in a mad panic while skillfully own-goaling. i have heard that the rounds go quick, but i think "claustrophobic" is the description i really needed to hear. when i first made the soccar pitch i thought it was fairly big but i also have a bad habit of making game areas way too small. a larger pitch (and slightly smaller goals) would be super beneficial. same goes for kickoff; when i initially placed the cars in the kickoff location i didn't have the off-screen ball indicator in. having the ball visible was a plus so the player could easily find the ball. now that the indicator's in, i can at least move the cars closer to their own goal ala Rocket League. the feedback is great and appreciated, thanks for giving it a play! this is the first time i've completed a game, and adding features post-launch is exciting since i'm no longer on a deadline to make things Just Work™. my next biggest feature (other than the QoL improvements above) is going to be local two-player, and i really hope people get a kick out of it!
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Aug 6, 2017 22:21
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Every time I finish a Jam game I get a heap of hits from this one japanese blog and I think it's cute as hell. Shout's out, random Japanese blog! http://matatabi-yasiki.blogspot.ie/2017/08/dumii.html
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Aug 7, 2017 09:37
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This post comes a bit late, but here it is! The final public link for SUPER MEGA 256-IN-1! Play [significantly less than] 256 games!  Experience anime!  Attempt to enjoy Friend Bear's Funny Activity Pack!  Discover the terrible secret of Gameball '98!  Test your knowledge!  man I don't even fuckin know As mentioned before, this build is MUCH more stable and complete than what was shown off on the Gong Show, as well as a bit easier to follow. I'd really, REALLY appreciate it if you guys could give it a play through and post your impressions/offer feedback! Hitlersaurus Christ fucked around with this message at 15:03 on Aug 7, 2017 |
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Aug 7, 2017 11:13
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Giggs posted:Don't do that! I'm glad you voiced your concerns because I've been struggling to compose mine into a readable and constructive format to help make the jam better. I also disagree with your original statement that it was somehow your fault. It's not your fault that your game doesn't get the same leeway that other types of games get on the stream. There are issues with the Gong Show that I think should be addressed in future. Gong Show has always focused on giving participants feedback from the perspective of the standard mainstream gamer, teaching developers how regular people might react to your design. Most are not going to give your game more than 2 or 3 minutes to hook them, and the Gong Show gives a fairly accurate simulation of this through a happy accident of the streaming format, which forces my patience down to the level of the average game player. To be clear though, I do not play dumb during Gong Show (I just am that bad at video games  ).The Gong Show has never been about showing your game in the most positive light. It's always been about showing your game through the lens of the gaming public and helping you grow with that knowledge. The Gong Show will never be about spending 30 minutes per game exploring each rad feature you spent weeks on. It will always be about showing you how actual people will play your games and destroy your designs. Interesting games will always get more airtime than uninteresting games. SimShine for example, the most complex game we've probably ever had submitted to Awful Jams got a full 25 minutes on the Gong Show, more than twice as much time than any other game in the block due to Everdraed's guidance and the fact that it has a well designed tutorial to explain the intricacies of the game. To sum everything up, the Gong Show is designed to punish complex games that lack good design, which in the real world would get eaten alive by most game players. By design it encourages slick, well though out, and engaging games. It's purposefully abrasive to games lacking tight design.The amount of effort you put into making a game is completely irrelevant when evaluating the game's qualities. If we told everyone they did an equally great job and everything about their game is a beautiful snowflake just the way it is we'd be doing a tremendous disservice to all contestants. Calipark fucked around with this message at 18:52 on Aug 7, 2017 |
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Aug 7, 2017 18:50
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More! Awful Runners This is another game that I really like the idea behind. Running between ports with contraband, dodging the Sea Fuzz, making a name for yourself, it’s all good. Unfortunately this game is cursed. Or I’m cursed? We’re both cursed? I played this shortly after the deadline and was totally lost, and gave up. Recently I read the awfuljams page and realized what I was supposed to be doing, and took another shot at it. I went across the mainland to try and sell the Rum I picked up at the start, and then continued on to try and get a feel of what each place was looking for. I ended up in Oxford, and then the curse manifested. The wind was heading East. For 3 days, it headed east. Getting out of Oxford and along the coast was a total slog, but I didn’t have money to go south to the islands and buy other cargo to even kill time, I’d just end up in the same place. Here’s one thought that might have helped alleviate this issue, if you can’t move or need to move a bit faster, perhaps you could spend some of the more realistically “spendable” cargo on your crew to row forward or something. No wind? No problem, hold down some key to force feed your crew Apples and watch your ship pick up speed! Then I make it to Hamilton and drop off some booze and earn those wonderful ducats, and what happens next? Wind is going E. Takes a while to get out and around the peninsula and start heading south, very slowly, to get more goods. Get around the peninsula and halfway to Costa Libre (which didn’t even have booze to sell to me, ironically) and the wind switches North.  If I was a pirate all this stuff would be useful storytelling elements when I’m at the tavern commiserating with fellow cutthroats and such, but it gets tiring fast in game.I appreciate the lack of music for the sounds of the wind and sea, though maybe some different audio would help keep up the players spirits through the appropriate and (mostly) relaxing journey. Also the wind indicator on the compass is a bit misleading and would have been better if it mimic'd the boat flag's pointing to where the wind is going instead of originating. This is a difficult sort of game to make, let alone in a month. I’m surprised how much I enjoyed it when I took the time to actually figure out what I should be doing and how to play it. gently caress the wind gods and nicely done!  The Booze Barn When I watched the stream and heard this game was 15 repetitions of the same cycle of 4 games I thought, “Wow, that seems like a lot.” But then it turns out to only be 10, and I actually would have been fine with 15. For a first foray into 3d this is quite good. None of the games really take much advantage of it, but that’s a smart choice to have made (assuming it was made consciously ). The minigames are all fair enough, though some are definitely more difficult than others. I was a little disappointed to not having been able to afford every upgrade, despite getting perfect scores several times. The corn/bug game really ramps up by the end of it, but before it got too hard, I did manage to pull some Zoro-rear end shenanigans that I was pretty proud of. The boiling minigame powerup actually made it more difficult for me. I didn’t buy it until month 8 or so and I suppose I was used to the very heavy inertia of the blue arrow, so when it was suddenly half as heavy, it threw me right off. The speed of the little yeast thing after the upgrade was really nice. Zooming around tons of fart noises was nice.The story was adequate, though by the end of the game it sorta just drops off. It started off pretty dramatically, but the end of prohibition kind of takes the wind out of its sails. Perhaps some choices could have been added to the game in terms of how the character addresses his family and their newfound wealth. Totally unnecessary, but hey … it could be cool? The various sound effects are nice, and the music is calming, though some more variety would go a long way. A job well done.   Soul Castle I think I get the idea that it’s parodying a type of game that’s self serious and brooding, and dark and mechanically, uh, direct? Decisive? But the really good bits of this game are hidden behind what can be a pretty frustrating first 5-10 minutes. The last 1/3rd of this game is loving great. The first time I played it I didn’t have any trouble, didn’t even die until the boss fight. I just replayed it and had a much more difficult time, but poo poo, that ending.People should see how this game progresses, at least. Ultigonio is still a good good music maker (is the Ending Theme anywhere to be listened to or downloaded?) “...and the castle … it looks so ominous. As time comes to a halt [snickers], silence starts to overflow my CRIIIES, are inconspicuous… Wooden man, are you punishing me? Is this the price I’m paying for killing all skelet … ons? This is my re .. demption song. I need you more than ever right na-ooow. Can you hear, me now? Cuz I’m the final, knight, and I killed the, ro bot man, and now the castle is in a white void. I don’t know where I am, but… it’s not … I’m alive again but the truth is that I’m only one … finalkniiiiight. After all the laughter dreamk leaving my dreams will come to life… (whispers) come to liiiife”   Crazy Smuggler Good idea, but it’s just a bit on the wrong side of frustrating. The cops are brutal blues-brothers ludicrous drivers which is fun and funny to see, but when you get bumped and don’t have the time to get back into motion these cops will ram you like you’re a palisade in 15th century France. At that point you’re guaranteed to have your car destroyed which is a bit of a bummer. The hits you can take are pretty limited, and it seems the booze is better at surviving these hits than your car is. I even once had my car destroyed when I went over a sidewalk and managed to have my hitbox just clip it enough to cause a collision which took something like 20% of my car health away. Balancing is probably the biggest issue with the game. It sounds good, it looks alright (though the mosaic shadow thing is weird, I’m quite curious about that), and the car has a nice sense of speed. The boost powerup is great! The slow mo I could take or leave. The core concept is rock solid, and bootlegging would fit around the gameplay really nicely.There’s the skeleton of a fun game in here but the bones are kinda misaligned, unfortunately. I look forward to ATNC’s next jam submission!  This totally makes sense. People don't give a hoot about the developer's intentions/effort if the game annoys or frustrates them, they can just move on to something else. But you said it yourself, SimShine is a particularly complex game for the jam and it got a whole lot of time, mostly because Everdraed expressed his trademark enthusiasm, support and positive attitude. Many judges over the years aren't so insistent that you follow their instructions and so they let games get gonged. Maybe the game is bad, but maybe it's just different and even the judge isn't exactly sure how to show off it's strengths. The jam is, at least for now, still pretty small, so that's why I was thinking there could be more focus on each game. Also, I'm not advocating for being positive to bad games. I'm pretty sure I didn't say anything like that, but if I did or gave that impression, that's my bad. I don't want the stream to turn into you and the judges trying to come up with ways to say nice things about bad games. That would be terrible. Thanks for replying, Jon! Giggs fucked around with this message at 19:13 on Aug 7, 2017 |
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Aug 7, 2017 19:11
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I mean that's kind of how I interpreted the reaction to mine after I'd gotten over the initial pain of it. I won't lie, it was pretty intense pain particularly as I had worked as hard I did. After that passed though, the question oriented to "but why did it go down the way it did" and I re-watched the footage, noting reactions to certain parts and what in particular seemed to cause the biggest problems. So I've decided to spend a week post-jam trying to address as many of the problems as I can just to see if I have a better product at the end or not. It won't fix the problem at the games core if it was particularly unappealing idea to someone (I do wonder if even the aesthetics were an issue..) but it might teach me a few things and if at the end I have a more solid base I could go on to use it for something else. Ultimately, it was a play-test session for free and I got about as honest a reaction as I could ask for, which is valuable. If it's OK, I would like to post a link to it in here for some additional feedback when I've made the changes I've noted so far.
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Aug 7, 2017 20:10
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JonTerp posted:To sum everything up, the Gong Show is designed to punish complex games that lack good design, which in the real world would get eaten alive by most game players. By design it encourages slick, well though out, and engaging games. It's purposefully abrasive to games lacking tight design.The amount of effort you put into making a game is completely irrelevant when evaluating the game's qualities. If we told everyone they did an equally great job and everything about their game is a beautiful snowflake just the way it is we'd be doing a tremendous disservice to all contestants. Does the gong show have to be about this though? Sometimes I'm not trying to make something with mass appeal, thats not always what I want to explore, a jam seems like the best place to have someone actually try to understand what you're going for, it' be cool if the Gong show could work to reflect that approach. To me, the whole joy of a jam is doing weird and unique things. For some it's to deliver something resembling something that would try to get hits on steam, for others it's about making a funny narrative thing that gets some laughs. I certainly wouldn't advocate that the gong show waste 30 minutes figuring out how to enjoy a skill based game, but maybe if the process behind the show (ie: games allotted to judges) can recognize games that wont stream well initially and have some sort of plan for that. Some types of games simply wont be cool to figure out live on a stream when some reflexive or mechanical skill building is required and I think it's a shame to exclude those games from getting something resembling "fair attention" on the stream for that reason alone. edit: I'm sure this wont go over well but maybe having two categories of jam submissions, "experimental" and "polished", where you can evaluate a game more on the criteria for what it's going for instead of "is this a hyper polished sellable game", because I'm not very interested in making those and I really like this jam and want to see more people exploring interesting mechanics and ideas and getting hung up less on "JONTERP PROOF POLISH" a cyberpunk goose fucked around with this message at 21:27 on Aug 7, 2017 |
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Aug 7, 2017 20:58
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Raujinn posted:I mean that's kind of how I interpreted the reaction to mine after I'd gotten over the initial pain of it. I won't lie, it was pretty intense pain particularly as I had worked as hard I did. After that passed though, the question oriented to "but why did it go down the way it did" and I re-watched the footage, noting reactions to certain parts and what in particular seemed to cause the biggest problems. Before I say anything else, I want to say that I'm so grateful and humbled by the amount of time and patience the folks on the Gong Show gave my game; thank you so much! I've been doing these jams since SAGDCX, making this my fifth jam in this community, and the feedback from the gong show has been so helpful because it has been pretty tough but also consistent. Additionally, I am not a gamedev in my day job so it's one of the only opportunities I have to get feedback on my game design skills on such a granular level. I initially took a poor showing on the Gong Show pretty hard but instead of thinking "oh I suck, forget this jam," instead I got caught on "I'll show them!" Now every time I work on a game - any game, not just a jam game, I think "how can I JonTerp-proof this?" To me that means doing as much as I can to hook the player in the first ten minutes without frustrating them too much. This time I broke from that self-imposed rule when I intentionally made a game that requires more than ten minutes to really enjoy, but I did so with the awareness of how and why I was breaking my own rule. I can't say that I've ever been entirely successful at making a JonTerp-proof game, and perhaps never will be (he was "lucky" enough to stumble onto a SimShine bug by accident that I still haven't figured out how to make happen on purpose  ) but I can look at my older games and know that I have been entirely successful at being closer to that ideal with each successive game.Oh yeah and I also demo my games IRL on the reg and that helps A LOT. In my city there's always at least one opportunity a month for local indies to showcase their games for free, so I try to hit up as many of those as possible. Check in your area and see if there's anything like that you can take advantage of! I have been trying to bring some of my games to commercial release and every time I demo at an expo or showcase, it feels like I get to have a do-over of the Gong Show. As for my first jam game, the one that got the reception I was so upset about, I've worked on it off and on since then and two months ago it was greenlit on steam and this past weekend I demoed it at an expo and it became the hit of the indie section, drawing crowds and people who would drag their friends and family over so they could try it. I'm still not anywhere near as skilled a gamedev as a lot of the other folks in the SA gamedev community, but I'm a better one than I was, very much thanks to the tough critique of the Gong Show. That's my JonTerp-proofing story, thanks for listening  Edit: this weekend I also demoed SimShine a bit and a bunch of people needed my help to make it past the very first part of the tutorial. When the game tells you to look inside your Buy Crate to get the things you need and centers the camera on it, a lot of people -- people who like video games, since they paid to go to a game expo! -- would hover over the Buy Crate and never click it, therefore getting stuck. These people were not stupid, or at least, they didn't seem stupid. You just really cannot take anything for granted when it comes to getting people into your games. I knew SimShine wouldn't be for everyone, but before the expo I wouldn't have thought that I needed to say explicitly click on the Buy Crate to access its contents but now I do. Some people really took to it (one guy played it for like an hour and a half straight right there on the expo floor!) and I got some really great feedback, but one of my biggest takeaways was that even after having dealt with needing to massively overhaul the tutorial for Delenda Airlines post winter jam, I still have a lot more to learn about easing people into a new game. So that stuff JonTerp said: JonTerp posted:complex games that lack good design, which in the real world would get eaten alive by most game players. is absolutely true and is if anything an understatement. Xibanya fucked around with this message at 21:50 on Aug 7, 2017 |
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Aug 7, 2017 21:07
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another takeaway from the Gong Show format is hearing how content-lite you may be. missile champs got credit for controls/graphics/music, but the rounds themselves are short and there's no two-player. my main focus for the jam was getting in basic gameplay that controlled tight and felt good, but i had to sacrifice additional gameplay for that. this is a good thing if people ask for more; that means they like what they see but want more! LEGS, which was very mechanically tight (and a blast to play), lacked variety in stages and round structure. what is there is sound mechanics, now it's time to add more and really tie up the package. i appreciate the gong show format, it reminds me of college when we had to let other students test our games. playtesting had two rules for the developers: 1) if you have additional instructions not available in-game or controls you want the player to reference, you get one index card to write it all on and place next to the PC. 2) no coaching. don't tell the player the controls, dont guide them to an item or the next area, keep your goddamn mouth shut until they're done playing. it was the most frustrating experience and i'd gladly do it again and again. seeing moments of gameplay that are common sense to you take forever is an exercise in patience, and watching the player skip upgrades and secrets is heartbreaking. however, you take away so much information on how to improve or advance your game that it's mind-boggling. my ego got hurt during these playtests, but i got over it later on when we made the game better and saw the results in the next round of playtesting. Portal wouldnt exist if Narbacular Drop didn't go through this; same with Portal 2 and Tag: The Power of Paint. let the frustration flow through you, and wield it to make yo poo poo better and better.
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Aug 7, 2017 21:47
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a cyberpunk goose posted:maybe having two categories of jam submissions, "experimental" and "polished", where you can evaluate a game more on the criteria for what it's going for instead of "is this a hyper polished sellable game", because I'm not very interested in making those and I really like this jam and want to see more people exploring interesting mechanics and ideas and getting hung up less on "JONTERP PROOF POLISH" I think this jam's bent is on evaluating games as if they were destined for release, but if you want a goofy loosely run jam that is all about the silliness, I did such a jam this Spring and am doing another in the Fall so stick around. This Fall Dogpit jams is organizing a weeklong jam around two themes, accessibility and a theme that will be announced at jam start. The last Dogpit Jam, Games Vs Nazis, was a total blast and one of my favorite entries was one in which you smash panzers with a hot dog. So you should do that one! It's not in any way affiliated with Awfuljams but it has a lot of the same participants and it has a not-Gong Show stream that's run exactly like the real Gong Show except without literal references to gong-ing, so in a way your request has already come true! 
Xibanya fucked around with this message at 21:55 on Aug 7, 2017 |
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Aug 7, 2017 21:51
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double post!
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Aug 7, 2017 21:51
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I understand this, now that you've explained it. I agree that testing games from an impatient player perspective is useful. However, I think improvements could be made in telling teams that's what they'll get w.r.t. the gong show. To that end: a cyberpunk goose posted:edit: I'm sure this wont go over well but maybe having two categories of jam submissions, "experimental" and "polished", where you can evaluate a game more on the criteria for what it's going for instead of "is this a hyper polished sellable game", because I'm not very interested in making those and I really like this jam and want to see more people exploring interesting mechanics and ideas and getting hung up less on "JONTERP PROOF POLISH" Maybe just allow teams to opt out of the Gong Show when they submit?
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Aug 7, 2017 21:58
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To what end? The gong show isn't the jam. The judges judge, the gong show gongs.
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Aug 7, 2017 22:04
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I didn't want to have this discussion because I knew it wouldn't really go anywhere productive. I think the format of the gong show specifically is arbitrarily limiting and could be expanded to be more about discussing the strengths of games and maybe not on a first-time-play basis if a game isn't about a first-time polished experience. It's even more arbitrary when you realize that the gong show has nothing to do with the judging process, it's just for fun.NuclearEagleFox!!! posted:Maybe just allow teams to opt out of the Gong Show when they submit?
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Aug 7, 2017 22:09
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I really like the Octo-jam streams. Maybe have the judge say a few things about each game they way the Octo-jam is, and also have JonTerp doing his thing. I like both.
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Aug 7, 2017 22:12
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I'm having trouble understanding what you want to see the Gong Show do differently without pushing the judging process out to three weeks while we wait for each judge to scrutinize each game so that they can accurately 100% represent each game's positives during the Show. The entire point of it is to demo each game in a harsh environment. It's supposed to be a for-fun stream where your games are critically picked apart as if it was a for purchase product. That's the whole gimmick. I mean we could go back to the days before we had the judges in each block to act as game ambassadors where every game is just a repeat of the "No Call Men" dumpster fire segment from the first Gong Show. To put a clear line of separation between judging and the Gong Show.
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Aug 7, 2017 22:24
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Dieting Hippo posted:1) if you have additional instructions not available in-game or controls you want the player to reference, you get one index card to write it all on and place next to the PC.  this is amazing, why didn't I think of it? I'm stealing this ideaAs for your next point, I think some coaching is OK, it just depends on the context. One of my games is a rhythm game and often people feel self-conscious if they gently caress up so I've found encouraging them to keep going ("you're doing great!" "Now you've got it!") tends to result in better engagement, but that probably wouldn't work so well with like, an RTS.
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Aug 7, 2017 22:27
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JonTerp posted:I mean we could go back to the days before we had the judges in each block to act as game ambassadors where every game is just a repeat of the "No Call Men" dumpster fire segment from the first Gong Show. To put a clear line of separation between judging and the Gong Show. Why is this so black & white? quote:To sum everything up, the Gong Show is designed to punish complex games that lack good design, which in the real world would get eaten alive by most game players. By design it encourages slick, well though out, and engaging games. It's purposefully abrasive to games lacking tight design.The amount of effort you put into making a game is completely irrelevant when evaluating the game's qualities. If we told everyone they did an equally great job and everything about their game is a beautiful snowflake just the way it is we'd be doing a tremendous disservice to all contestants. This is a very defensive post coming from you, it reads like someone who doesn't want to admit that maybe their format kinda sucks in some situations or has limits. "If we told everyone they did an equally great job and everything about their game is a beautiful snowflake just the way it is we'd be doing a tremendous disservice to all contestants." Like where is this coming from? This was never a part of any of the discussion so far. If that's what you're taking away from my gong show format criticism then I'm extra frustrated. a cyberpunk goose fucked around with this message at 22:37 on Aug 7, 2017 |
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Aug 7, 2017 22:31
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Xibanya posted:As for your next point, I think some coaching is OK, it just depends on the context. One of my games is a rhythm game and often people feel self-conscious if they gently caress up so I've found encouraging them to keep going ("you're doing great!" "Now you've got it!") tends to result in better engagement, but that probably wouldn't work so well with like, an RTS. oh yeah, encouragement is A-OK, but going "no, wait, what you want to do is hit a bit earlier- no, earli- earlier than that" would be a violation. and in the context of a show floor or a super-chill environment i can definitely see giving assistance. but if you're wanting the pure view of someone playing your game at home without the dev to help, point 2 is the super brutal way to go 
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Aug 7, 2017 22:35
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Thanks for the review! Those are fair criticisms, and I think you've stumbled upon to the technical issues that really hampered our game, so I'm going to talk about them here seeing as I can't write a postmortem yet: 1. Secret framerate dependencies. You say the bottles were fairly resilient, and they can be... At high framerates. I only realised after submission that the bottles were only breaking in the editor, however I think the editor (on my pc at least) was just high enough to avoid the problem that the gong show experienced of getting stuck in the terrain. (I'm aware it was possible to get stuck to the sides of buildings but never to random bits of ground like they did). This is somewhat related to the second problem: 2. The UE4 Advanced Vehicle Controller we were using seemed to do something weird with the collisions, as the actual collision volume of the vehicles should have just been a cube, yet there was all sorts of weird collision issues i.e. The vans getting stuck on curbs when turning. The vehicle controller also didn't expose its parameters by default, meaning we couldn't add all the drink powers we'd planned. EDIT: And while I'm defending it, I'll say that no one spent two weeks on traffic simulation(I don't know where that claim came from), and almost all the code for the traffic was necessary for the police to behave properly. The civilian cars are just police that don't chase you. If we had more time I would've probably just put them on rails rather than even bother with vehicle controllers for them. Praseodymi fucked around with this message at 23:01 on Aug 7, 2017 |
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Aug 7, 2017 22:45
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Dieting Hippo posted:oh yeah, encouragement is A-OK, but going "no, wait, what you want to do is hit a bit earlier- no, earli- earlier than that" would be a violation. and in the context of a show floor or a super-chill environment i can definitely see giving assistance. but if you're wanting the pure view of someone playing your game at home without the dev to help, point 2 is the super brutal way to go When I'm on a show floor and a dev tries to babby's first game explain how to play at me, I stare at them for 3-5s and then walk away from the game. Because they ruined the play test for both them and me. As a developer, play testing other people's in development games is great because you can directly see situations where gameplay doesn't work and try to relate that back to your own games. It happens at least once at every event I go to. I guess some people just don't want to see people get frustrated at playing their game. Even if the goal of those people is to get frustrated at playing their game.
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Aug 7, 2017 22:48
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I think there could be many reasons: -A dev knows their game isn't ready for prime time and doesn't want to waste people's time. -A game has some secrets/surprises they don't want to be spoiled for potential players. -The team is aware of the design flaws and has moved on. -It's their first game and they're not ready for that level of criticism. -The gong show panelists aren't the intended audience. -The game is good, but doesn't play well on a stream (and doing so might leave a bad impression). -The dev finds the format off-putting/discouraging. What I'm not saying: -The Gong is not good/useful. What I am saying: -If the Gong Show's criticism style is gonna stay the same, more could be done to communicate what that style is and its purpose up front. -Maybe add an opt-out option, but if the first change is made, I think this part wouldn't be as necessary. If the jam is gonna expand beyond SA, consideration needs to be made for what a person unfamiliar with SA will think of aspects like the Gong Show (and whether the Gong Show will be tenable if the jam starts drawing more than ~50 entries a year). NuclearEagleFox!!! fucked around with this message at 22:55 on Aug 7, 2017 |
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Aug 7, 2017 22:51
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a cyberpunk goose posted:Why is this so black & white? That was not a response to any of your posts (and was posted before your last post so I'm a bit confused.) I guess what I'm doing a poor job of saying is this: The Gong Show will always be the Gong Show. There are games that do well and games that do poorly. It hinges on judges being good game ambassadors and knowing enough about the game to push me toward the interesting bits I would normally miss. It's far from perfect: We miss things, judge's personal tastes can get in the way, I can get tired and crabby 4 hours into a stream, etc. But it does what it was designed to do, a for-fun stream just for laughs and educational value. Games "without mass appeal" actually do quite well on the Gong Show, the games that really get shafted are those with heavy text & slow pacing, we readily admit this during the stream and encourage viewers to go download the game to play it for themselves. It's just a short-coming of the format. It would help me understand what you're trying to suggest more if you used examples or situations, because if you just say "Some games don't get the time they deserve on the Gong Show." All I can say is that we will try to do better next year. JossiRossi posted:Ultimately, the Gong Show is just one way to present a jam's entries. We've settled on the current format after numerous streams and jams, and I think it does "as well as it can" for the most part. Any presentation will be flawed in one way or another, or at least have different strengths. Calipark fucked around with this message at 23:17 on Aug 7, 2017 |
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Aug 7, 2017 23:07
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I kinda hope it doesn't expand past SA to be honest. I enjoy that it's an annual community event and I think ditching that would be a shame.
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Aug 7, 2017 23:08
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Doom Goon posted:I have no idea what this is so I can't give much about it. I tried to Google it but it just made me feel old. Funny and I wish the controls were smoother but that's fine. Worth a playthrough! Afal posted:Soul Castle - I have never played a Dark Soul. Wasn't sure what to expect with this game. I liked how it was almost a rhythm-esqe game (I don't know if that can be said for other souls-like games) where you have to time correctly when to swing your axe or dash across. I loved how the game got weirder and changed style as it went along (this seems to be a theme in a lot of games this year). A really good endboss that requires you to think about your moves rather than straight up mashing towards their face. A good game. Giggs posted:Soul Castle Thanks for the kind words, seeing Soul Castle get poo poo on by the gong show was a bit discouraging, especially since I wasn't able to see a reaction to the ending.  I'm punching myself pretty hard, since one of the last things I did before release was add a little bit to the second and third levels, which were the ones people got stuck on the most. Would have been better to have less content it it meant it was more likely for people to get through it. Since you asked for it, here's the ending theme, it was the last thing I did before submitting the game (also I was drunk) https://clyp.it/hly2eths
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Aug 7, 2017 23:11
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Ultimately, the Gong Show is just one way to present a jam's entries. We've settled on the current format after numerous streams and jams, and I think it does "as well as it can" for the most part. Any presentation will be flawed in one way or another, or at least have different strengths. That all said, if you have complaints you feel won't be addressed you can do your own showcase, we want these games seen, so more showcases is a good thing.
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Aug 7, 2017 23:16
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Not sure what else there is to add to the whole "Gong Show Considered Harmful" discourse but here we go. I think a bunch of people have been in this jam long enough to realise that the style of their games they submit to this jam kind of mould into what can be considered "what would look good on a livestream" rather than "what's the best game I could possibly make". This ends up with games that kind of fit a "10 minute slot" because that's usually the allotted time frame for each game in the livestream. The problem comes if someone then makes a "quality" game that doesn't fit the stream's dynamic it's going to go off poorly. A lot of people have told me that "An Video Game" was pretty good, but it went poorly on The Gong Show because playing through the game requires a more intimate session than a public viewing with multiple people discussing/commentating on what they are seeing. This goes for video playthroughs in general. The Beginner's Guide is my favourite game of all time but I think that let's plays of it are a complete waste of time (unless it's the extremely good one of Davey Wreden watching someone else play the game and commenting and then also playing spelunky part of the way through). You've got to think of JonTerp like PewDiePie. A PewDiePie without any of the following or the white nationalist tendencies (though I'm not sure about the latter bit) but still a "personality" that plays video games Like here are some of the things I've seen that tend to be really popular in the stream:
Things that don't go very well
I thought LEGS was a great game (I'd imagine that I'd get my rear end kicked if I played with actual people though). I can totally see how it wouldn't work on stream (I... wasn't there... sorry. Apparently shitposting is bad, but also, I LOVE HORSES BEST OF ALL THE ANIMALS I LOVE HORSES THEY'RE MY FRIENDS). I'm reminded of an interview I saw with someone who had been on America's Got Talent. One thing they mentioned was that on AGT, it's the Judges that are the stars of the show, and that the people "taking part" are the guests. Therefore it is beneficial to incorporate the judges in your act and make them feel like the stars, and then you secondary. That's probably the approach for games that might work for the gong show. Who knows? That being said, some games that end up being favourites are ones that performed poorly in Gong Shows (and vice versa). I don't know what the solution here is. I'm just pissing into a rusty bucket full of piss labelled "Something Awful Dot Com"
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Aug 7, 2017 23:24
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JonTerp posted:It would help me understand what you're trying to suggest more if you used examples or situations, because if you just say "Some games don't get the time they deserve on the Gong Show." All I can say is that we will try to do better next year. (this is all specific to the Gong Show) I feel like maybe the gong show could do well to have more than just you running it. Maybe have a block per judge, take IJ for example, IJ runs a very conscientious patient show and gives a lot of thought into his comments and feedback. Some attempt could be given to allot games to blocks based on the style of judging the judge goes for. For Jon I'd focus on assigning games that are clearly going for polish & raw execution for a first time experience (OVERREACH, the bootleg kr3w), for someone like IJ I'd assign Legs, SlimShine, maybe loosen the notion of the games having to be a first-play experience as per the judge's discretion and maybe with some optional-to-follow guidance on the game's page ("hey give this game like 15 minutes of goofing before you feel done with it"). I think the Gong Show is the best opportunity to have serialized catalogued discussion about the failures and successes of various games and it kinda blows to just eat throw a stack of games with one minor set of superficial basis for judgement (their sheer polished/juiciness/super-short-term-playability, currently). a cyberpunk goose fucked around with this message at 23:44 on Aug 7, 2017 |
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Aug 7, 2017 23:26
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a cyberpunk goose posted:Some attempt could be given to allot games to blocks based on the style of judging the judge goes for. For Jon I'd focus on assigning games that are clearly going for polish & raw execution for a first time experience (OVERREACH, the bootleg kr3w), for someone like IJ I'd assign Legs, SlimShine, I'm not dismissing this idea or endorsing it, but speaking as someone who has done a Bootleg Gong Show ( ) this would be insane to do because of the logistics involved in setting up the stream. There's actually quite a lot of setup involved in having guests and having them all talk with acceptable audio levels and letting the guests see the host play without latency and then showing the commentary + game stream to the audience. It would only really be feasible if they all were in the same room, which, as you could imagine, would be difficult to arrange.
Xibanya fucked around with this message at 23:42 on Aug 7, 2017 |
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Aug 7, 2017 23:40
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Anything that requires a certain amount of reading or has any amount frustration factor is going to have a significantly worse showing the further in the day it gets placed. Soul Castle was played at the tail end of a 4 hour stream, so the amount of time Jon spent on it (something like 5 minutes) was significantly less than something like, say, Red Planet IV, which was at the beginning of the day. Placing games that look fluffier near the end of a block and coarse games near the beginning might help give some fairer coverage. Additionally, the gong timer wasn't here this year, so there was no gauge for how much time was being spent on a game. a cyberpunk goose posted:I think the Gong Show is the best opportunity to have serialized catalogued discussion about the failures and successes of various games and it kinda blows to just eat throw a stack of games with one minor set of superficial basis for judgement (their sheer polished/juiciness/super-short-term-playability, currently). I agree. Like it or not, the gong show as it stands is the canonical showcase for awful jam entries.
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Aug 7, 2017 23:41
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Gunzil posted:I agree. Like it or not, the gong show as it stands is the canonical showcase for awful jam entries. We don't like that it's this way, since Gong Show was never meant to be a "showcase" and are working toward getting more exposure for submitted games on other popular streams.
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Aug 7, 2017 23:43
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JonTerp posted:We don't like that it's this way, since Gong Show was never meant to be a "showcase" and are working toward getting more exposure for submitted games on other popular streams. Okay, well some feedback then: it'd be cool if it was this way, or had some room to be this way in some cases.
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Aug 7, 2017 23:45
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Xibanya posted:I'm not dismissing this idea or endorsing it, but speaking as someone who has done a Bootleg Gong Show ( I'm well aware, still good thoughts though
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Aug 8, 2017 00:01
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There's a lot in here that is either factually wrong, ignoring the point, or childishly passive aggressive, but out of all of that, the part that confuses me most is that you tested An Video Game and got "a lot of people" to honestly tell you it was pretty good. JossiRossi fucked around with this message at 00:09 on Aug 8, 2017 |
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Aug 8, 2017 00:03
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JossiRossi posted:There's a lot in here that is either factually wrong, ignoring the point, or childishly passive aggressive, but out of all of that, the part that confuses me most is that you tested An Video Game and got "a lot of people" to honestly tell you it was pretty good.  I agree with everything Afal posted so I'm not sure where this is coming from.
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Aug 8, 2017 00:11
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