Reviewing is difficult. I don't put a huge amount of weight on the ratings I receive, and the ratings I give aren't a 1:1 copy of my remarks in certain ways, but I did leave a comment on just about every game I rated this LD, generally avoiding generic praise.

I am reviewing in a direction that I'm personally interested in, which isn't "is this game really polished right now," but rather, "could this game be expanded upon successfully?" A few of them are, in fact, essentially perfect at the scale of a game jam game, already communicating everything they could hope to given their concept - so I give them 5's.

But most of them aren't "perfect at this scale", they're "technically interesting but run out of steam" - the design is built too much on reskinning a generic framework, so by itself the game isn't remarkable and there isn't really anything to extend to make it remarkable. And so my reviews get much harsher on design than on polish as more of the basic stuff is covered, because while getting to any gameplay is a technical achievement, focusing only on quantity and polish in a short time frame amounts to "mindless crunching" and it's something that becomes more of an issue as you get to those higher percentiles and the ratings get more competitive and you might start thinking that the way to "win at game jamming" is to make Large Quantities of Game. My highest placement in an LD, #23 Overall, was done more-or-less in that way, and it worked - but it also contributed to my disillusionment about what I was doing with games. And that's why I'm interested in the "can be expanded" aspect: There are formulaic ways to expand scope, by adding more content according to a template, and adding features like crafting and quests and achievements and so on, but more often than not, these things turn into filler.

Polish alone is a "school grade" way of thinking about game making: You might get an A for effort, but it's also taken for granted that you will work on the polish if you just keep working on the game. I don't want to be someone actively encouraging all-nighters just for the possibility of cramming in one extra feature. We already have a AAA studio system that is hungry to make Large Quantities of Game as efficiently as possible. Whatever your opinions about that process, it has a big influence and throws off our calibration about what we should be aiming for in a game jam context, because whatever you do in an LD, a whole big studio with a schedule of years and a few millions in funding can certainly do more of!

It's in matching the polish work with design work that says something interesting that can bring a game over into the realm of "winning hearts & minds," and it's a harder skill to improve, because even in a small prototype, that work doesn't sit at the surface, so it's harder to get the feedback you need, and harder to give useful feedback. It almost doesn't matter who you ask, whether they're a friend, a big project stakeholder, whether they have lots of experience, whether you go and do a huge data collection campaign - after years of seeing what I can get by asking fellow humans, I've concluded that unless they've spent a long time thinking and gaining expertise in that specific design realm(like, as much as you have), presenting them with a playable build will most likely only give you insight into the surface stuff, and that means that the upper end of the LD rating system will always be noisy and not really be capable of solving your deep issues or making keen judgments about which is the "best" game. So I'm not too worried about my own placement, even though like noted in my last post, I see areas where I can do better.

I recently posted an article about performance feedback that covers this issue and relates it to the general question of performance: how do you get feedback on how you're doing, if you can't just ask people? I don't think I have all the answers, but do check it out if you want to see my current thinking.

With all that in mind, I found myself categorizing my types of comment into tropes:

• Major technical and accessibility issues - difficulty running game, missing instructions, playthrough stopping bugs, control issues, that kind of thing. Note the issue, suggest a way to resolve if any.
• Generic design - a game that follows some very conventional lines and mostly feels like a reskin. Sometimes this happens from technical skill constraints, but just as often it's a creative problem and the feedback becomes targeted towards concepting with more creativity. Pulling together themes, scenario, mechanics etc.
• Guess-and-check design - A highly specific rule alteration to a generic design, which usually leads to a game communicating random things(for the worse). Discuss expectations and coherence.
• Scope substituting for coherent concept - game has lots of features and content and shows technical proficiency, but design never resolves into a whole. Discuss scoping and making a coherent concept.
• Designed, polished, but could be expanded with some changes - feedback about scaling the design and possibilities.

And sometimes after doing this I thought, "wow, I was the first comment and it was pretty harsh, I'm so sorry". But I was sticking to more-or-less the same process the whole way through. Will I do it like this again next time? I have no idea. I'll probably revise my process in some way. But I'd like to think that I am doing some good by aiming for consistency with my own rules and not trying to fit in with the crowd.