The ECHOMAZE will be out soon! Our artist @cherryk

The jam results turned out to be quite unexpected.

First of all, I want to thank all the participants — for our first time joining a game jam, it was really inspiring to see so many genuinely great and thoughtfully made projects. You could clearly feel how much time, effort, and passion people put into their games.

After the results were published, though, I was left with the feeling that the voting system doesn’t work entirely evenly. Some projects that actively participated in rating other games and received a lot of ratings ended up far below projects with a much smaller number of votes.

Because of this, it creates a strange kind of motivation: it almost feels more beneficial to interact less with other games and avoid “showing up” too much in the voting filters, since getting a high average score is easier with only 30–40 ratings.

At the same time, this is absolutely not a complaint about specific participants or their games — many of the entries were genuinely strong and deserve attention. These are just thoughts about the rating system itself and how visibility gets distributed between projects.

What surprised me the most wasn’t even our game’s placement, but the fact that I didn’t see several projects I sincerely enjoyed among the top entries.

That said, I honestly don’t even know how such a system could realistically be improved — within the context of a game jam, it’s probably a very difficult problem to solve. I just wanted to share my thoughts after seeing the results.

In any case, we’ll definitely participate again. For a first attempt, I think our project turned out pretty well 🙂