i made a game called corrypt recently that's kinda explory and puzzly, i think it's what you're looking for actually

Failed: got a basic prototype with throwing a ball around, then got pretty busy with some non-game-related stuff, then got massively inspired to make something else and ran out of time.  Not to worry!  Might come back to this later sometime.

with people is real multiplayer.

It kind of sucks to mock people for being overweight.

Maybe I'll think of a better name, but right now it pretty much says it all: a sports roguelike.  Try to get the ball to the other end of a randomly generated field while fighting off giant mutant beetles.  Find randomly generated loot - a magical racquet giving +2 to throwing distance, enchanted protective knee pads, a tunic with mystical number inscribed.  Etcetra.

(I figured a local multiplayer e-sport would be WAY too obvious a choice for me.)

Oh!  He is so adorable and proud.  Love it.

Here's a game with randomly changing keys that might help guide you: http://nottheinternet.com/games/abastard/
It's a cool idea, interesting to see different takes on it.

Those pixels are gorgeous.
This going to be 2-player or AIed?  Local/online?

So ROBOT COMBAT is a sport.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sports#Remote_control

Turns out sports can be pretty great - who knew?

Ascension does this and as far as I can tell nobody complains.  It might be helped by the fact that it's selling an actual board game and then expansions to the board game.

To me, it feels like there's an unspoken contract where if you're selling an app you promise not to be a dick about IAPs.  They can be there, but they can't be terrible.  There's no such expectation for a free game, hence me tending to avoid free games with IAP.  I'm not your typical iOS customer though.

There's a certain skill to just letting something be finished when it's good enough.  You need to become comfortable with a certain level of imperfection.
Learnt this in art in school, I could spend hours doing smaller and smaller details on a painting and making it slightly better, but past some point there are diminishing returns and probably nobody but me would notice the difference.  With a certain number of paintings required, there's simply not time to perfect all of them - but it turns out you actually end up with better paintings by moving on and starting new ones than by endlessly perfecting a single one anyway.  It's the same for games.

Legitimate question: You guys know how can I sign up as a judge? I remember that last year there was an email address.

Could try emailing brandon boyer? ([email protected]) I think that's what Matthew or someone said to do in last year's thread.

not sure whether I'm going to enter anything this year.  Pity they cut the mobile section; I'd have been pretty confident of getting into that, but essentially no chance otherwise.

i'd be happy with that for a week, sure, however, i'd have expected more than 300 sales considering it got a kotaku post. i'd have thought kotaku post would lead to 1000 sales minimum, considering it's by far the largest blog about games

yeah, i don't think kotaku means anything in terms of sales; i had a $2 ithing game show up on kotaku and it still only sold 300 copies in 6 months so yeah.

thanks for sharing numbers guys, this kind of post is always interesting to see.

I've been working on local-multiplayer games on and off since this compo, it's really inspiring.

Here's an album of nine games, including Exuberant Struggle, I've made since then: Kompendium
download (windows)
download (mac)

Hey I read about your game on Touch Arcade! How did you get them to review your game?

I don't know eh - I didn't even send them a code or anything (and another time when I sent them a code for a different game they didn't write about it).  Some people were discussing it on their forums first though, I think they pay attention to those.