Ok, now that just sucks.

*sigh* Note to self. Total immersion games don't go over well with judges.

I have to say that I'm rather surprised at the judges' interest in Roll4K. It's definitely a nice game, but I hadn't thought it would do as well as it did. Did that left-field anyone else?

Edit: Doing the average without Shelton's, I would have had a 95%. So I guess the game did generally go over well with judges. I hope that shelton tried running it more than once. Windows machines can crash for a lot of reasons.

that vote was a bit unfair, it took alot for me not to edit that to like a  +50. gotta keep the contest honest, though.

wish it could be fair though.. I mean, I can personally admit Warpstar4K is not a better game

>JM4k in particular, got nailed because the judges had trouble running it.

Oh yea... 46th place. I almost cried

Sheldon's vote also pulled me down a bit. Would be 92 without his vote, but its alright. Had to explain the concept like 20 times... so I can somewhat understand that not everyone gets the idea. (It also wasnt that finishing-blow-ish in my case).

Bad Sector's bad score surprised me a bit. It was one of my personal top5.

My personal top 2 were Miners4k & fuzetsu.  The platform games generally did better than I expected (Note to self - enter at least one platformer next year ).  My top ten would have been a bit different, but then I guess I would be scoring originality (why didn't I think of that) & programming technique perhaps a bit mored strongly (It's the nerd in me  ).

I'm happy with Speed4k's score (although I'd like to have placed higher).  Frag4k was Ok.  I thought KanaInvaders would be last, as I only entered that one for a bit of a joke really.  Overall, my gameplay was sucking a bit.  Need better gameplay next year

@jbanes I think Xero should have scored higher too.  Terrible luck with the computer crash.

Alan

Congratulations!
Miners4k was in my own personnal top 3 (with 'A spring in the air' and 'gravitator 4k')


Woogley -> Would it be possible next year to remove the best and worst note for each entry?

That's just an idea... When an artistic part is involved (I think this is the case here), you may have a love/hate meaning to the vote... It may be fairer to remove the extremes (I don't think it would have changed anything for Miners4k ) in the final count.

Maybe just a stupid idea

Congrats to the winners !

I didn't have enough time to participate this year, not even enough to play all the entries, but I've had quite a good moments with miners4k !

Lilian

Just goes to show how differently people see things.  I thought Gravitator should have done a lot better, but it got bad scores for graphics and one judge didn't get it.  I thought gameplay was very good though.

I would like to say a big thank you to all the judges.  Your comments were very helpful in determining how to improve for next time.  Not just the comments for my games, but also for everyone elses.

Congrats Markus!

Very worthy winner. Next year you might have to submit your contribution a bit later, so that other coders won't give up right away, and not submit. 

Thanks to the judges as well. Good work and really fun to read all the comments.
Yep, that would be very nice to see. It is quite surprising and fascinating to see how diverse the opinions are  Most (almost all) games in the mid ranges have scores ranging 60 - 90!!! Even Miners and (VERY unfortunately!!!) Xero got some real outside votes... (Xero is second placed in my book)

I agree with "Myself"  about the scoring "just remove the highest and lowest scores". It seems like all the judges have a fairly equal share of "outcast" votes though, but might be easier to see with individual judge vote list, sort of like last years. Hint. That might also make it easier to see how JGO ppl and non-JGO ppl were voting. That also surpriced me a bit at first glance.
I agree. And only 0.3 from the top spot  . I would have guessed top 10 but would not have put any money on top 5. But Kev seems to have the feeling for what really works and nobody will fail understanding the concept. Roll4K had no real outside vote and that is a big reason why it ended up so high in the list.

Easy to understand and especially control seems to be very important. Top 4 games are really quite simple games. Anybody here could probably produce a clone of those games in under an hour (with exception from Miners probably) but it also shows how important presentation and "feel" is to a game. The ball in Roll4K bounces just right. Ctrls in Goomba is spot on and surprisingly for me even when I coded it, the explosions in Balls made the game twice as much fun to play, even though it had no real effect on the gameplay.

Thanks to Woogley as well, for Java unlimited!

Congrats to Miners4K and Markus - that really is a great game!

Interestingly, my three entries wound up getting ranked in exactly the reverse order of the way I personally consider them.  Gravitator is certainly a love-it or hate-it kind of thing.  And thanks for the encouraging comments about it, gang!  I'm definitely going to continue work on it and will post enhancements soon.

On judging and scoring, if you guys wanted to discard the highest and lowest scores (very standard in athletic judging), that's called a "trimmed mean".  You'd want more judges (nine in the Olympics), I think, and that might be hard to do.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trimmed_mean

Wow. I never expected to end up that high - thanks!

My personal favorites were Miners, Fuzetzu, Goomba, Roll, Xero and Ares (in no particular order). I do think it's a pity that Ares got lowered that way; a trimmed median seems to be a good idea. Also, I suggest that next year, we encourage the judges to use the full scale (one of the judges gave 80 for games he didn't like, while Mahlokan used the scale better, giving 70 for games he liked but not having as his favorites. A couple of the judges hardly gave any game less than 50).

Great work, everyone. And big thanks to the judges!

>From what I can tell, the median score already is the final score.

Median is taking the score in the middle and not the average. Say there are scores: 20, 30 and 47795. Then the median would be 30. In the case of an even number of scores you take the two in the middle and average em. Eg 10, 50, 60 and 100 would be 55.

edit: "Eg 10, 50, 60 and 100 would be 55."

Holy crap example, batman!

Ok... better one... 5, 10, 20 and 100 would be 15.

Ah, my bad. Thanks for the correction.

EDIT:

Indeed. I've noticed that hard-core gamers almost always surprise the programmers on how well they can do at a game. This was something I actually counted on in Xero. Just looking at the high scores in Xero is enough to show how amazing the players can be. I was expecting high scores to be around 75,000 or so. But the scoreboard shows scores well over 100,000 points! 

Hi ctrl-alt-dev! Welcome! I'm glad to hear that you enjoyed the competition! Were you the author of Daleks4K?

Just on a lark, I did a little statistical analysis.

I want to preface this by saying that the three winners definitely deserved to win, and I'm not recommending any changes in the results at all!

But this might be useful info for deciding on a judging system in the future.

If you remove the highest and lowest scores (the "trimmed mean"), the top three scores are: Miners4K, Roll 4K, and Xero.

Interestingly, the trimmed mean results (on average) in a 1.21 higher score for entries.  Although there was a wide range.  The best gain was +12.89 for Xero, and the biggest loss was -2.71 for Daleks4K.  It's interesting that the change between mean and trimmed mean was usually positive: that means that there were more extreme low scores than there were extreme high scores.

If you use the median instead of the average (or mean), the top three scores are: Miners4K, Xero, and Goomba4K.

The three biggest standard deviations (on untrimmed scores) belonged to: Xero, Kana Invaders, and Daleks4K.  These were games whose scores had some wide variations.  The three smallest standard deviations (again, on untrimmed scores) belonged to: Goomba4K, Roll 4K, and Gandalf 4K.  These were games with very consistent scoring.