How correlated categories are to the overall score

Ludum Dare 18 Graphs

The single best indicator of what your overall score will be, is how fun your game is. Innovation, theme, and graphics all are noticeably correlated with the overall score (though a few outliers managed to get a good overall score without meeting the theme). Audio has a slight correlation. Games with good humor tend to have a high overall score, but games with little humor don’t necessarily have a low overall rating.

 
Next I have a few observations on the ranges of values in various categories.

Innovation: Very few games scored below 2 in innovation. It’s clear that innovation is being done.

Theme: Most of the entries made a good attempt at the theme, but a few seemed to ignore it.

Audio: Not many entries scored well in audio, and some put little or no audio in their game. Does this mean participants don’t have very good audio skills, or just that audio was somewhat neglected in the competition?

Humor: Very few games rated above a 3 in humor. Only handful of games both tried to be funny and succeeded.

Comments

Martoon
07. Sep 2010 · 18:27 UTC
Interesting data!
07. Sep 2010 · 18:48 UTC
Very cool.. thanks for putting this together.
07. Sep 2010 · 19:01 UTC
This is really awesome! Thanks!
bluescrn
08. Sep 2010 · 05:49 UTC
That graph of Fun vs Overall is awesome.
08. Sep 2010 · 14:05 UTC
Fun is king, as it should be. The stats tell us that the humor category isn’t making an impact and perhaps should be eliminated. I found none of the games I played to be in the slightest bit funny, though I do wish they were. It’s hard to be funny!
08. Sep 2010 · 15:28 UTC
Dude, very cool.
moltanem2000
11. Sep 2010 · 17:52 UTC
Wow, nice stats. I’m going to have to nit-pick on something though.
Alan Lynn
13. Sep 2010 · 14:22 UTC
My graphs are now under the creative commons attribution license if anyone has a use for them.