Well, here we are, at the end of the race. This has been quite the experience for me, it's made me think about a lot of things. To cut to the chase, here's are my thoughts and reflections.

During The Jam

I had a very rocky start, because I just didn't like the theme very much. I spent a lot of time just trying to come up with a good idea, but everything I came up with at first was stuff I felt sure a lot of other people would do as well. So I wasted pretty much the first half of the first day just sitting around being frustrated at my lack of ideas, and I even spent four hours making a prototype for a game idea which I ended up just completely scrapping. At the end, I took a good hard look at Floppy McFloppyface and I decided that I just really didn't care much for what I'd made at all.

Results

Then suddenly, people started giving feedback. Which has been pretty overwhelming for me, because I've gotten almost nothing but positive feedback. To my great suprise, it seems people actually enjoyed my game.

Understandably, Audio and Graphics are my weakest categories. I'm not an artist, so shitty programmer art was all I could do. And heavens forbid me from ever touching FL studio again. This was the first time I ever tried using a DAW to make music, and it should clearly be the last as well!

However, my game has been ranked 137th in "fun". I've been looking at a lot of my favorites from when I was judging, and the "fun" department is where a lot of the high ranked games are lacking. Given that observation, I'm really happy with getting such a high rank in the fun category. It doesn't matter that much to me that my graphics and audio weren't too amazing, because despite that people actually enjoyed playing my game. Which is something I never expected.

Then there's the big kicker. I got 9th place in Humor!! This is utterly mindblowing to me, but holy hell did it make my day! Obviously I did try to make it funny, but even in that regard I felt like I'd failed. Y'all are making me blush, I don't deserve this! :smile:

Conclusion

Clearly, I'm not a very good at judging myself. I've had people dislike the things I've felt good about before, but now I've also experienced having people like what I've felt bad about. I think I need to take a good look at myself again, and I also need to brush up on my game design knowledge. There's obviously still much for me to learn when it comes to understanding what people actually enjoy in games.

All in all, I can't begin to express how surprised I am by the rank I got in humor, but I'm also just really thankful to everyone who voted for me. I'm really happy you all liked what I did so much, you all liked it a lot better than I did myself, and that means something to me. I hope to see you all again for the next one, I'm gonna do my best to improve my skills (especially my art and audio skills) and see if I can do even better next time.

Peace out!