This article is a devlog where I write about our general progress and what happened to us after the game we entered in Cave Jam #3, Down Up Purgatory. You can reach the original here.
Yes, greetings, I’m Ege. As the first “devblog” or even status update, I wanted to write a little bit about our first jam experience, jam results and I wanted to share what we added/edited on the game page.
During the jam, as a team with my friend Batu and the people we came across/recently met while searching for a team, we made a 2D platformer game set in a heaven/hell as a result of brainstorming and concept elimination on a good or bad theme in 3 days (+4 hours). It’s not the first rodeo of two people in the team (khenzur & Salmir), but relying on our past experiences and interests, we saw what it’s like to sweat about teamwork and game development in the first jam.
For those who are thinking about joining a game jam…
Let’s not assume that people who will be attending a jam for the first time will read this, but let’s not say that no matter what happens, whether your knee bleeds while running, or you are let down halfway, or you can’t finish the game, or there is a conflict within the team… It’s normal for a lot of these things to happen, and I’ve listened to a lot of young people like me, people of the same age, on Discord, what they’ve been through, what they’ve been through, and what they’ve been through. Lesser things, worse things. In the same way, there were things that I didn’t like within the team, setbacks outside my expectations, things that I would be demotivated, but at the same time, I didn’t stop myself from trying to try new things when necessary by going out of my comfort zone, I continued. At times, I rarely slept with that ambition, which is not new for me, I had the same feeling when I was studying for university finals. I say never make excuses, know how to use the internet, and don’t stop yourself from trying new things. As a physical jam, of course, I am also curious about what kind of an environment would be created, but we also ran a horse in a Jam that is both online and the most popular in Turkey.
If you think that life is too short to give 4 minutes of reading time Now after this chapter, you can go to the bottom of the page and check our Mac+Linux announcement and be free.
About Cave Jam #3
Regarding the results; itch.io’s own algorithm and public voting and then at0m + experienced moderators will select the top 50 (+11) games from 600 or even 542 (because he forgot to remove the remaining ~60 from the draft, MAKE THIS PAGE PUBLIC) games and the top 5 games will be selected before the final juries and their teams will be rewarded.
Between the numbers announced at the beginning and the current ones (notice the numbers I put in brackets), there have been slight changes in the plan, there have been a lot of people giving each other low stars in the public voting, creating bot accounts and posting 5 stars and positive comments under the jam posts of their own games. what at0m meant was quite expected, but I think it was a bit worse than he expected. The only explanation of how long the moderation and partners have been looking at 542 games and analyzing them in depth is only explained in one short sentence. Maybe it was a really tiring organization, maybe they really didn’t want to bother, but of course none of this is 100% true, it’s just a thought.
The only thing I cared about was that despite the crappy algorithm on itch.io, dozens of games that I expected to at least stand out made it into the top 60. In fact, until the actual list was announced, I told everyone many times that if a certain percentage of the games I expected to make the rankings didn’t, I was quitting this jam, but many people in many jams like me had big concerns like that.
Since itch.io’s algorithm puts games with less than 10 votes in the top 10, there were a lot of people who couldn’t focus on the fact that the algorithm was broken and said “wow, where did I go wrong, wow, what efforts did I spend”. If the median of the number of votes of all games is taken, if 9 of your friends give 5 stars to all criteria, if there are those who comment “it’s very nice, I played for 6 hours”, that game becomes the 1st and grabs 10,000 liras. This is the algorithm in short, friends.