I’m no senior to these Dares, but I did participate last time and spent quite some time voting on around 80 games.

Why talk about the voting when we haven’t even started?

There are a few things you can do and think about from day one (and many of these have been posted before but I think they deserve repeating).
This is not a complete list, and they are my opinions after last round of reviewing games.

I would say that besides simply completing on time, the most important thing is to make your game inviting to play.

The first step in that is to remove all unnecessary hindrances for people.

1. Make a web/html port and call it just that, because several people will search among the games using such words. This is because after a while it becomes too much hassle to even unpack things
2. If you can’t make a web-solution make your distribution self-contained. Don’t require anyone downloading dependencies or compiling. It should be a simple extracting and clicking on the executable. Here there are several more things to think about:
• If possible, don’t have the game install itself into the system. Have it run out of its folder (I don’t want to have to spend time cleaning up after having installed 30 games).
• When compressing your game for distribution, package the folder it lies in. I would expect more like me will unpack all LD28 games into one common folder and it’s much nicer if I can simply click extract into that folder. On that theme, give your folder a unique name. So don’t call it ‘LD28′ or ‘Corruption’ (if that theme wins). But call it something like ‘LD28 [Your game name]’ or ‘LD28 [Your username at LD]’ (if you don’t know what you will call your game). Name the folder correctly from day 1! Chances are you will too busy thinking about other things when you get ready to submit.
• Make sure it is obvious what file to click on to start the game
3. Make it obvious how to start playing your game when it is running. Don’t assume people will hammer around on the keyboard trying to debug how to move to the right. Also if you use explicit bindings, you should map to qwerty-keyboard but avoid mappings that exclude those with e.g. French and German keyboards (or give option to player to map keys).
4. You will probably have debugged the start many times, and you probably know exactly how to play your game. We don’t. So don’t make the game too hard from the very first second

Then, of course, you will need to have interesting screen-shots and a thrilling text that makes people want to test your game. But when that is done, the above could sum up to the following:

You will have very short time in convincing players to spend some extra time playing your game so that you get some good feedback on what you’ve created. You should therefore do everything possible to at least make sure you do not alienate the players before they have even started playing.