Hi, thanks for reading this kind-of-postmortem!

Mandatory disclaimer first : English is not my main language so expect a few syntax error here and there 😁

Here are the kitchen's secrets and what I usually do to optimize my games's possible outcome.

🐼 Recipe for a good ranking

🐼 Recipe for a qualitative UX

I'm honestly not the best on that, there's multiple hundreds of other games in this jam alone that deserve an award, some surely more than a silly rolling panda tryhard game. Go ask and learn from them first!

If I have to still say something on the topic, apart from the usual "aim low and within your skillset" gamejam stuff, I can share a few things exclusively applicable to arcade-scoring games as they've become my specialty. Here are my go-to rules, each one learnt after another ""failed"" jam game (12 years of that gets you far, that's the true secret, keep learning!) :

🪙 "Players must feel a lost game as a result of their skill, not of the game itself" ("your greed will kill you" is my favorite way to do that)
🪙 "At a given point, the game's state should be a result of very-mostly the player's will and inputs"
🪙"Allow player to express creativity"

-> you're the one building the platforms, the layout is your creation, if it goes badly it's your fault.

🪙 "First-timers should be able to learn the game as well as tryharders should enjoy their 50th replay"

-> each run starts slow and picks up speed fast, average run for low-mid-levelled players is aimed around 2min

🪙 "Two player playing an equal amount of time should have an equal opportunity to score"

-> balanced worldgen, even tho I didn't push it very far this time. My worldgen is a markov-chain-like 2D probability array (between air, ground, downward bamboo, upward bamboo, dual bamboo, and Torii), and there's some stuff like "don't spawn more than 1 red coins in the same screen width" if that's of any interest to you =) I usually add bagged random to even out chances over time too, but not this time.

🪙"Less stuff more polished is better than more stuff less polished"

-> 50% of my jamming time is bugfix/polish

🪙 "Allow player to play the game how they want"

-> if you don't want to pickup red coins that's ok, chill play is fine too

🪙 "Tolerant gameplay will feel fairer, and smoother at higher pace"

-> I usually make platformers so input buffering, edge deflection, coyote time, edge grabbing, etc. are my must-do. This time however you don't control the character, so I instead made it so building atop the character usually move it to someplace safe, and crashing into single bamboo won't kill you, only nudge you to the sides.

🪙 "Avoid realism getting in the way of readability"

-> pandas gakuzuka-sized and collecting coins half their size?! Sure thing, readability through the roof ✨

🪙 "FTUE should be flawless"

-> nothing to say on that, I kinda screwed up 😂 I really should allocate some fixed time to make tutorials, even if in a jam timeframe it's haaaard! Note to myself here: Ask the playername before its two-second-in instant death, not after... (the bottom 60% of my leaderboard filled with "aaasdfkjdfhg" is a testimony to that miscalculation)

🐼 What's that "core-audience bonus"?

OK, so, here it is, the meat of this post.

Gamejamming don't end after submission. That's only the mid-way moment where you drop the gamedev hat, and instead wear two others : The playtester for other games, and the market analyst for your own.

I don't know if my choice of "market" term is right, but I hope you still get what I want to say 😅

Each game has its target audience. You wouldn't give Eve Online to playtest in a kindergarten, or the feedbacks would obviously be negative and irrelevant to improve the game in its current direction (it would be good to aim your game at a broader spectrum tho).

So, if you're aiming for high ranks (you shouldn't really do, gamejams aren't about that, but both aren't incompatible...) the goal is right here, to ensure this core-audience-skew-factor is as high as possible. Note that your shooting window is centered around your game's theoretically-perfectly-objectively-found rating, so you have to have a solid basis and can't expect dramatic variation. It's only a small "bonus" after all.

That's unfortunately paradoxical. If your goal is to kickstart a successful jam into a full-fledged indie game, you'll be far more interested in having a large variety of feedbacks... but those will inevitably tank your rating, so you won't be able to take profit from a nice ranking. Tough tradeoff.

Here are the ways I usually find effective to ensure your game reach your ideal target audience, while still keeping ratings honest and authentic, self-willed:

🪙 Don't advertise your game unless your advertising is doing some heavy filtering

🪙 Don't engage in rate-4-rate if it doesn't seem like your game is to the taste of the jammer you're trading with

🪙 Have an honest description, if your game need some tryhard to enjoy for example, say it soon!

🪙 Keep on making similar game, make it your personal specificity. Players will follow you and come to your next game knowing it's already surely something they'll enjoy

🪙 Playtest streamers are not only making the post-jam so fun by simply being there and doing their work... but it's also a huuuuge source of core-target players : the viewers (mostly other jammers waiting their turn) who aren't thrilled by your game will ignore it, but the ones who like what they see and go to your page to play it are already hooked and won. Mind you this only works if the streamer is having a positive experience with the game to start with.

🪙 If that's a pain to you (like when using CTF2.5 as engine) don't bother with web builds, quicker access to the game can mean quicker test time, less players will be experiencing the real good stuff in your game. The effort needed to download the game (and unfortunately the risk with it if you don't run games in a sandboxed environment) act as a "really wanting to try this game" filter.

And here are bonus things that will slightly impact your game's perception, and therefore hopefully the ratings too:

🪙 Don't left behind any aspect of the game. Polish the gameplay, the art, the music, the itchio page, Everything! A 4-5-5-5 game will often get rated 5-5-5-5 because the overall coherence bootstrap itself, human biases.

🪙 If you solo-made the game, say it! You will either trigger "wow impressive" or "aw that cute", both will be a bit embarrassing to our inner introvert, but are very positive feeling. (And you should be proud of it anyway!)

🪙 Really try to get the theme deeply linked with the gameplay, in a obvious way. Be bold and write the theme somewhere, explicitly. Play-on-word are always a lot funnier, but might not get a 5/5 (even if there weren't any "rating" category in this jam, seems like many people included it under "creativity")

🪙 Hidden references (long-named-isekai in my silly title's case, not the most original but indeed effective) gets you bonus "I got that ref" points

🪙 Get lucky. That's unfortunately a deep part of gamejam rating that you can't control, and it really have a huge impact if you end with a low amount of rating in the end. Got striked by a non-jammer giving 1 star to random games before hitting his friend's one? No luck on you, that's 200 places lost in the end. (I hope that the org's time for filtering ratings managed to find those and get rid of them tho, they're spoiling the fun)

🐼 Isn't that a bit unfair?

Sure is. Most collaborative ranking systems are by definition. Maybe one could imagine something where you could only vote on an non-chosen random list, and game submitted to you are only available for feedbacking purpose? Seems awesome, but this surely would have other flaws too...?

Truth is, gamejams are gamedev, and marketing will (unfortunately?) always be a part of both. Target reaching is one way to influence stuff, your title and keyart is another, which influential person talked about the game too, the way you communicate on discord, did Mark Brown playtested you game on his streams, etc. etc. Getting fake scores would be obvious cheating, having an effective communication to get real scores is not, but it's clear that the line between the two is blurry. Nothing's black or white around here =(

In all matter, remind yourself that a good rank or not... won't change anything. The fame is a bit artificial, last for a few days at most, and to turn that into the-opportunity-you're-dreaming-of is another huge lottery ticket. (I can give you post-first-rank depressing stats if you want...). And you'll maybe trade that luck-based success with a heap of toxic comments beneath your game anyway 👀💦

Ranking high will feel good yes, that's for sure... but you really should feel good having made a game regardless of it! As someone said on the jam's discord :

Maybe the real treasures were the games we made along the way.

Unrelated Post Scriptum ✊

Now that I have a short timeframe with some reach, a quick political word about having a game creator career on this planet: Don't spend your life searching for greener grass elsewhere... stay where you are and kick butts to make it grow luxuriantly! Unionize and fight for a better game industry, in its current state it doesn't deserve you all, beautiful peoples. Together, the masses are holding the power to radically change things, don't let the opulents gaslight you into thinking otherwise. Bisous from france! ✨