I won’t deny that I’m quite disappointed with my results, this time. I usually try not to care all that much about the ratings, I simply check how my game did and that’s it. But this time I aimed at getting a good score in graphics, putting pretty much everything else aside (well, except audio… somewhat). I focused more on polishing the graphics than on making a playable/balanced game… When the compo was ending, I simply designed a simple level, added some screens for the menu, the intro, the win/lose “scenes” and called it done.

Well, let’s take a look at my score before moving on:

Only taking into consideration that I focused a lot on graphics and that there were 1199 compo entries, I didn’t do all that bad. I score above ~88% of entries in graphics and ~83% in audio.

But if I were to compare my latest entry with my previous ones…

Scores per entry (per category)

Percentage of how close I’ve got to first in any category

Yeah… still not all that bad. It’s in fourth place, when sorting by graphics. So, why am I so butthurt annoyed that I’m even ignoring conclusive (and absolute) data?

I thought it deserved a better score. During the voting, I really thought that a game with graphics as good as mine deserved at least a 4.0. C’mon, look at that parallax, those leafs on the background, the smooth animations… How could all those, even considering the lame gameplay, score less than a 4.0?

So, I replayed my LD#31 entry Cold Remembrance. It got 20th place in graphics, even without any gameplay; you simply hold left! I wanted to compare both and try to understand what that “game” had that this game didn’t.

Well, that “game” felt complete, and there was nothing unnecessary. But the experience looks and feels great. The audio merges with the graphics and the story; each aspect of the game make the other better.

On this entry, on the other hand, there’s an element that really takes it charm away. Although the graphics and the audio do merge well, the first impression the players has is with that ugly title screen. It’s not even functional, as the text goes through really fast and fills all of the screen…

I could probably had gotten away with telling the story on the entry page and removing the title screen. I didn’t even need a win/lose screen… I could had simply displayed a message (in front of the “playstate”) after you got to the end/died and then I could had restarted the game…

Yeah… it was probably just that… =/

Well, lesson learned!

I’ll still probably work on a post-compo version, but I want to first work on a post-compo for my LD#32 entry… XD

Thanks for reading! Until next time! o/