My game was
Quiet Life:
I didn't expect my scores to be high, but I didn't quite expect them to be this low either.
Calculating the percentiles, that's my worst ever score (relative to other entrants) in Innovation, Theme, Audio (obvious considering I didn't have the time and added sfxr bleeps solely for feedback), Humor and Mood, with it being second worst ever in two of the remaining three categories, Overall and Fun. (Graphics was my third worst score ever, but that's because that score is always low.) As this was my 8th Ludum Dare, this is a bit of a disappointing result.
I was considering developing my game further, but at this point I'm just not sure if anybody liked it. On the other hand, my only LD game appreciated enough to keep being linked occasionally (my LD22 entry,
Hikikomori Manager 2012) is also my second worst rated game (it was my worst rated game until this LD), so ratings don't say everything either. (Meanwhile,
my best rated game, which was top 10 in three categories and top 25 overall, has only been played by around 50 people and never receives any attention anymore.)
One peculiarity I noticed is that my rankings are lower than you'd expect from the ratings, particularly in theme - my Theme score this LD was 3.44, which ranks me 769th among the 1365 compo entrants (percentile 43.66%). However, back in LD23, my theme score of 3.47 gave me 202nd place of 1072 entrants (percentile 81.16%). Though the score was only 0.03 lower, the percentile dropped by a whopping 37.5%. It's not just voting trends changing over a long stretch of time, either; my LD29 entry's Theme score of 3.63 ranked me #235 out of 1492 (percentile 84.25%). I doubt that 0.19 points of difference was worth an over 40% drop in percentile. A lesser effect is also visible in other categories (my LD31 Overall score of 3.20 is identical to my LD24 score, but in LD24 I was at 75.55% yet this time I'm only at a percentile of 60.00%). I wonder if there's been a big influx of higher-rating new users this (or past) LD or if there's some other explanation for this strange change.
While we're on the subject of strange votes, I'm also not entirely satisfied with the ratings voters gave to other games. While I don't mean any offense to Molten, I feel that
SideLands's #95 Fun, #97 Overall and #240 Innovation for a game of which the biggest draw is that the screen is rotated 90 degrees and that practically plays itself for lack of difficulty, in addition to being short, is rather excessive. Meanwhile great games like Tifu's
Deicide (which despite its flaws in lack of player feedback and sub-optimal controls provides a great, fun, rewarding challenge) and Tuba's
Rome's Little Step with its awesome combat mechanics get screwed with low scores like #445 Overall, #610 Fun and #657 Overall, #419 Fun respectively. I get the feeling that voters simply don't take the time to truly play the games and rate them in a shallow manner after playing for a couple minutes at most. (For reference: 2.5Dino Arena, although the score doesn't fully compare due to it being jam instead of compo, beats Deicide in Fun and RLS in Overall.)
(In case anyone's wondering, these were my votes for the abovementioned games, in order of Overall/Innovation/Fun/Theme/Graphics/Audio:
2.5Dino Arena: 2/1/2/2/2/X
SideLands: 3/3/2/2/4/2
Deicide: 4/4/4/4/3/X
RLS: 4/3/4/3/4/4)
And to supplement our earlier discussion on positive/negative feedback, here are some gems from the people who voted on my low-rated game:
only 2days for that ? wow... Good job
Great game! I love this survival setting.
I had a lot of fun with this.
Good Work ^^
Wow! You did this in 48 hours?! That's awesome! Many features for such a small time. I've had fun playing this. So many recipes... It's awesome!
I lost myself at: "Under you: Dead sheep"
Excellent game!
Good job and in 48 hours! I did not live very long but it was fun.
Great game! 2/5
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