The results are in! I was thrilled to get #3 in Fun, which is a fantastic honor, along with Top 25 showings in Innovation and Overall. I’m super excited by this, and think it’s fun enough to refine for release. I’m all right with all the rating really, but I was surprised I didn’t get lower scores for Mood and Graphics, honestly. I’m not an artist at all, but I wonder what I could have achieved if I had spent more than a few minutes on my graphic sprites, or tried doing them in pixel art. Just a half hour of dedicated revision to my visuals near the end as the game coalesced might have been more impactful than the minor additional features I added during that time.
Cardinal Cell (LD37, December 2016)
This is a great boost compared with my quite mediocre first Dare last year, which isn’t surprising since for that one I didn’t really have a clear vision of my gameplay until almost the halfway mark… I just winged it the whole time. This lack of clarity of purpose as well as my inexperience with 48-hour jams certainly contributed. In the end I’m sure I was just coasting on the boost I got from Lovecraft fans by coining some Cthulhu chants.
Arkham Madness (LD34, December 2015)
In hindsight my experiences indicate that having a clear gameplay plan was critical to my success, and last year it may have benefited me to take up to an entire hour to detail all the mechanics I intended to create. And as I’ve said before, your game is all part of a single package… It’s entirely possible (and very human) if people were more charitable on my graphics and sound if they had fun, just as baller graphics and sound could have improved people’s impressions of how much fun they had (although thank god they didn’t drag down my Fun ratings this time! :-).