I’ve already done a post mortem for the game I made this Ludum Dare, but on returning to the website to check my “stats” there was a certain… nagging feeling. Like there’s some kind of genuine information I can share with other people that never really came across before. Partially because in retrospect, I largely wrote to get a brief amount of attention and additional ratings rather than being informative. I mean, I try to balance both a bit but there’s always that looming “link your game for more plays” feeling.
With judging winding down and feeling very content with the amount of feedback I’ve gotten, I think I can make a more sincere post about what I’ve been able to take away from this game jam. I’ll try to not go over specific details about my game, and instead focus on other aspects.
Community
Perhaps the most important aspect of my participation this time around was leaving feedback on other games and getting more of a sense of the community than I have in the past. I tended to leave fairly massive comments on most of the games I played, paragraphs on paragraphs of detailed feedback outlining my thoughts. I would easily pour half an hour, or even close to an hour over just one game… playing it… typing out some thoughts… playing it over a bit… tossing around thoughts in my head… typing them out. I’m not entirely sure what possessed me to do this, even with games that wouldn’t necessarily be considered good or finished… but it just felt nice. Some of the responses I got in return were some of the most memorable aspects of participating this time around.
Feedback Loop
I touched on this in my game post mortem, but I think it’s a fairly important part of what actually led to me loosing a lot of motivation and hitting a small bout of depression after the first week of rating games. I currently have 61 games rated, and I left a large amount of feedback on most of them, which was done within the first week… and ended up actually stressing me out trying to meet “quotas” for playing X amount of games per day. I felt the need to get as much feedback as possible on my game, even though I already was pretty aware of the shortcomings of my entry. Now, this led to me getting a lot of similar comments on my entry about those expected shortcomings… over… and over… and over again. I stressed myself out initially trying to get feedback to later continue to be de-motivated because the feedback kept reaffirming my initial failures. I think the appropriate course of action would have been to work harder on the post jam version and making meaningful progress improving what I did, rather than trying to get additional feedback on a game execution I knew was fairly flawed. Even if the post jam version wasn’t played very much I would have felt much better about what I continued to do rather than feeling bad about the feedback loop I kept getting. I don’t need any more feedback on my game, I feel like I know and understand where it went wrong. I feel good coming to terms with that and am considering playing a couple more games just to leave constructive feedback for people who need it. This relates back to what I said earlier about community, and how rewarding it can be just having that interaction.
The People That Made This Great For Me
I’m going to link the games of the people who responded back to me that really made me happy I took out the time to critique their games, even just small thanks were appreciated (in no particular order):
Speechless – by @MonoS
Quiver of Claws – by @Ben_Myres
Garden State – by @cbear_wallis
You Can Shave the Baby – by @chikun_dev
Kodama – by @geekdrums
Slug Fest – by @JamesMBorden
Sepulcher of the Unicorn – by @jon_fisch
Magnetic Fields – by oparisy
Curiosity – by @IanMakesGames
