J4K

General Discussions
#281

Oh, man - there was no scaling of the scores !?!? You’ve got to scale the scores, since there were no formal judging criteria (e.g. 1 == something, 2 == something else, … 10 == something else).

So…since I was consistently less generous than e.g. Chris, winners are heavily skewed towards those he liked :(. Couldn’t we at least have a scaling factor applied to each judge’s scores based on the mean of all the scores they each gave?

Also, reading Chris’s comments, wanted to add that I too was annoyed by the massive great popup that a certain author had on their two games.

#282

45th place… :frowning:

fsm=bad
midi=bad
readme=useless

#283

IIRC…a couple ran on windows with a double click but not on OS X. I didn’t spend long enough to debug them with a debugger and find out why.

Although I did work VERY hard for some because I was desperate not to have at least played each and every game. At first, I thought “**** it, if they can’t be bothered to make it work neither can I” but then I repented and slaved away to get them working.

But I drew the line at running a debugger or reading source…

Equally, there was at least one where the webstart wouldn’t work (turned out to be the apple-employs-morons problem of ignoring the mimetype, I believe).

#284

[quote]45th place… :frowning:
readme=useless
[/quote]
the haphazard submission and judging process meant that we didn’t always get the readmes. In two cases I just had to google/jgo-search for them to try and find some info on how to run them - looking back through 17 pages of forum postings for each of two forums isn’t feasible when you’ve got a load of games to test.

#285

Congratulations to the winners !!!

Funny to see appreciations of mine (bubble racer)

Gfx - Gameplay
9 1
10 10
5 5
:o

I’m eager to start a new contest 4-5-8-16k - not more please.
Since i’ve had some funky ideas to try…

Lilian

#286

Oh, well, at least I didn’t get the last place… :slight_smile:
I’m quite content with the results, to be honest, having relatively little programming experience and no experience whatsoever of either contests or making games small.

#287

[quote]Oh, man - there was no scaling of the scores !?!? You’ve got to scale the scores, since there were no formal judging criteria (e.g. 1 == something, 2 == something else, … 10 == something else).
[/quote]
Right now these are just totals. I’m hestitant to call any winners because of the way that secondary scores (e.g. music) heavily skewed the results. (I hadn’t considered what happens when you get an automatic 15 for music. ;-)) When I get the chance, I’m going to see if it changes the scores to do an average.

Also, if you judges want to make changes, do it now before these get certified by Woogley and Mlk.

P.S. I just noticed that the XLS file is corrupted. Looks like I accidentally uploaded in ASCII mode. I’ll fix it later tonight. Sorry about that. :slight_smile:

#288

Well, my game was distributed as zip file, which contained the readme, the game jar, two bat files and the graphics file.

[quote][…]
You need to install a soundbank to play the game with the JRE (JDK/SDK already has one). Grab it here:
http://java.sun.com/products/java-media/sound/soundbanks.html

Midsize is enough. Drop the soundbank.gm file into “/jre/audio/”. Usually you’ll need to create the “audio” directory first.
[…]
[/quote]

#289

[quote]I got beaten by TETRIS!?
I mean… er, good job. :wink:
[/quote]
Going over the sheets, there’s an error in the Chris’s sheet that I forgot to correct. Factoring in Blah’s mistake, the correct score for Tetris is 48.

Don’t feel too bad though. My entry was creamed by MC4K. For some reason the judges felt that constantly sliding off the track was more “fun” than shooting robots from the future. :frowning:

Ah well, to each their own. :slight_smile:

#290

I’m happy with 35/50 (Chopper4k).

Although I’ve never understood how tetris beats shooting games wrt gameplay… but then thats just me and tetris :wink: not any version of tetris in particular.

I’m just curious what constituted a de-merit though? Or was it different for each game?

Cheers,
Dan.

#291

[quote]Although I’ve never understood how tetris beats shooting games wrt gameplay… but then thats just me and tetris :wink: not any version of tetris in particular.
[/quote]
Judges could give bonuses or demerits for anything they wanted. So it’s pretty much an arbitrary score. :slight_smile:

#292

BAT files ?!? What am I supposed to do with them ::slight_smile:

I thought I read every readme for any game that didn’t work, but maybe I missed yours … which was it again?

#293

[quote]I’m happy with 35/50 (Chopper4k).

Although I’ve never understood how tetris beats shooting games wrt gameplay…
[/quote]
In the end, I believe I gave every tetris game 4/10 for gameplay, a reflection of the fact that although they used 0 effort picking gameplay with any originality or freshness, at least that gameplay didn’t suck and they all implemented it faithfully.

There were one or two games with gameplay where I thought “dude, you should have just cloned tetris” because they were simply not fun - then again, I may simply have failed to understand the point of them.

Or…there’s labyrinth, which I’m now discovering is quite fun, BUT it requires you have a particular form of mouse and you MUST be playing on windows (doesn’t work on Mac, doesn’t work on linux - I suspect because of the mouse-grabbing-and-manipulating code is bust). It also is waaaaaaay too sensitive … a game where you have to run in straight lines deviating by no more than one pixel (sometimes less!) is not tenable on most PC’s.

Which is sad, because when I happened to find a PC with a suitably insensitive mouse it became rather fun.

#294

Don’t get me wrong I’m not complaining at all. I’ve just never ‘got’ tetris :wink:

I’m not going to push the gamplay issue either cos I think mine was very simplistic :wink: But then I was just happy to get it in 4k. I wish I’d spent a little more time tidying it up though, executable etc. rather than just rushing it to get it submitted 3 or 4 weeks after doing most of the writing. Still it was fun.

Will it be possible to see induvidual ratings for games or are just the final avarages going to be displayed? Also did any of the judges have any individual comments on the games or was it just the scores?

EDIT: doh!!! just seen the tabs. sorry :wink:

Dan.

#295

BAT files ?!? What am I supposed to do with them ::slight_smile:

How am I supposed to write scripts for other operating systems if I don’t have machines with those?

I thought I read every readme for any game that didn’t
work, but maybe I missed yours … which was it again?

jm4k

Well, it doesn’t matter anyways anymore.

#296

Yes, it’s puzzling how some judges can award more graphics points for tetris than filledPolygon 3d goodness; mysterious universe indeed… ::slight_smile:

But regardless, thanks to all the judges for the hardwork!

#297

Thank you to the judges and organisers for a really fun competition :slight_smile: I can’t wait for the next one.

To blar*3:

I see you gave my game zero because you couldn’t shoot.

Perhaps since you were on a plane you couldn’t view my web site? The game’s web site (as linked on http://www.woogley.net/games.html) lists all the control keys, just below the downloads.

I know “UP arrow” isn’t exactly intuitive at first. I originally had it as “Space Bar”, but found that the “Up Arrow” worked nicer since ones right hand is on the arrow keys anyway and they control the turret movement. I would have had Space as a shoot key as well, but, I couldn’t afford the 15 bytes :wink:

Next compo, we definitely need to have some sort of standardised readme format that is submitted with the games. I would have zipped a readme with my .jar but didn’t like the idea of my distribution file being over 4k. I hindsight I should have offered a downloadable readme on my web site.

Cheers,

Will.

#298

re: Stag4K
Blah^h, I take it on a mac? Its odd that it crashed on yours, as it seams to work ok on mine (very very old). Any idea why?
No game? I’m sorry, but it had as much of a game as any other “shoot wave after wave of baddys”. I agree it was not great, but I found that comment odd.

#299

It might be interesting to see the sorted scores from each judge as well.

One thing I found frustrating was having to hunt down info in the forums and such. If I couldn’t figure out how to launch it easily that probably influenced the score by more than the one point for ‘executable’. I was very liberal with awarding that point though. If I started it without significant effort (basically JNLP or executable JAR) then it got that point. If I went to the command line and had to type then it was 0.

As for graphics… There were a few games with very simple graphics but they were very well done. They may not have had the fancy 3d algorithms, but they looked good for that particular type of game. I also factored animation quality into the graphics score.

I do think that the scores from each judge should be weighted against the mean from that judge in some way so as to give equal weight to each judges score. Onbe judge scoring all games near the high end vs. another scoring all near the low end should not result in the first judge overruling the second.

Some ideas for the next contest:

  • Make ALL games use the same delivery method, JNLP or executable JAR.

  • In the case of excutable jar, have the size all games based on a submitted jar with no signing or manifest info.

  • Host all games on the same site - with the exception of games requiring an online server. If the game can be judged properly with a local server, then set up two JNLPs , one for server, one for client… so that both run on localhost

  • Make binary scores quantitative so that all judges must agree on the same score for those criteria - e.g. executable yes/no

  • Add scores for runs on Windows/Linux/Mac… 0-2, 2 = runs perfectly, 1= runs with some problems, 0 = not playable. (e.g. for Blahs troubles with the mouse sensitivity on Linux/Mac he would score a 1, but on Windows where it ran well score a 2)

  • Crashes/Exceptions that should have been avoidable, (even without specific platforms to test on) should count against the entry in a significant way.

  • Platform specific issues are different, since all participants won’t have access to all platforms, and cost at most 1-2 points based on above “does it run?” criteria.

  • Have 2 rounds of judging… allowing the participants to correct issues after round one. Final score will be taken from round 2.

  • Have more judges, perhaps with automated online registration and submision of scores.

  • Score gameplay/graphics based on a ranking system instead of arbitrary score. E.g. judges must put the games in order of best gameplay to worst gameplay, best graphics to worst graphics. Do not allow ties from a single judge (ties can still happen as a result of adding the scores from all judges together). This then avoids the situation where one judge scores in the 5-10 range, and another scores in the 0-5 range for all entries thus skewing the overal weight of one judge’s opinions.

Anyway, those are some random thoughts… some of them may be dumb :slight_smile:

#300

Right, anyone that want dukes, post in the forum.java thread, and I’ll hand 'em out.