Yay! I also updated the Wikipedia article 
Wow - this made my day!
Thank you to all the judges for the effort you put into this. I think I speak for most people here when saying that reading these reviews really means something to the developers. Having done judging once (for the 2007 compo), I appreciate all the work you’ve put into writing these and playing the games. Again, many thanks!
Thanks for your work, like Morre say, I’m one of “most people here”. :
For my first participation I found the contest interesting and rewarding. I hope I will be able to submit something (even better?) next year.
PS: I like the “Room for improvement” ;D !
Great results, thanks for everyone. Special thanks to the judges. Really liked the reviews! Although we beat the number of games this year we did not reach 2012 number of game developers that submitted games. This year we were 34 game developers while in 2012 we had 42.
year game devs
2013 - 34
2012 - 42
2011 - 28
2010 - 28
2009 - 41
2008 - 17
2007 - 39
2006 - 37
2005 - 27
My review is boring.
@forthx: just something I want to see there based on my taste. I don’t know how much byte left on their classes but if it’s possible will be great!
@luisoft: blame Apo ;D
@appel, ra4king, ReBirth
Thanks for playing and writing up reviews for so many games.
When I get chance, I’ll write up a blog about the algorithms that I used throughout the years. I’m always impressed with what people come up with and what can be learned from them. For instance, the technique behind Alan Waddington’s Die Z and Gef’s Sorcerer4K appear similar and it’s something that I never explored.
If I ever write up that blog, I’ll explain the details of the driving game algorithms used in Out Run 4K and that game.
Thanks for all your efforts judges! it took me hours to play each entry and I was not being as diligent as you guys!
Thanks for your jobs, judges ! And specially for consistents reviews.
They will help for next year ! When I made my game, I found it great 8), I thought everybody will understand how it works, and so on… Not at all !!!
It’s very interesting ! Thanks again and congrats to everybody !
A massive thank you to the judges for their hard work in playing and reviewing our games! Your efforts are greatly appreciated, and your feedback is invaluable. You picked an excellent winner this year (it was my favourite also).
An even bigger thank you to Appel for organising and running the contest!
I would like to propose that we increase the size limit for next year’s contest, so we can fit in all the missing/cut features. How about 4.1k? It has a nice ring to it ;D
At first I want to say big thanks for the hard work to all judges.
I think Flywrench4k is a good choice. Great, hard and funny game. Congratz to Morre!
I am a little bit disappointed with the results of (some) my games but ok. Next year I will try it again …
Hey, awesome, Farmer John and Wizzy on 3rd and 4th spot! That makes me happy ;D Also, useful feedback on my games, especially Galactic Conquest 4K. A big thanks!
A special award for you my friend Most created 4k games in history! That’s an awesome feat by itself, and I think everyone really took note of this.
And your games weren’t about quantity, I found most of them very excellent and of high quality. It’s clear you’ve mastered the art of creating 4k games. I am curious, how much work was involved in doing this, for each game?
But as you said, I think it’s reasonable to be a bit disappointed with how they fared in the scoring, especially perhaps for the community vote, and judging maybe as well. My theory is that the high number of the games worked against you, especially in the community voting, people weren’t too keen on playing 25 games from one guy.
For me, I had to try to be careful when reviewing your games, because there was a tendency to rank them relative to your other games, and also demand more of them. So for every one of your game I had to ask myself, “How would I review and rate this if it was from someone who submitted only 1 game?”.
But anyway, ApoBeam and ApoBrain were my favorite submissions from you, at least one of them deserved to be in top 10. ApoMonoMirror was also quite good and interesting. ApoStress and ApoTreePuzzle were also quite good. I’m sure they would have fared much better if you would have only submitted them and none of the others. Just being honest.
I think in future contests having a maximum entries limit would be beneficial for everybody involved, something like 5 games from one individual.
Hope to see you for Java4k 2014 8)
What is the formula behind the grade score?
How do judges determine the score given?
How do judges determine the score given?
[/quote]
yep.
Well each judge scored differently, I didn’t get any of the other’s opinions on what score to give. I just had different categories and awarded points based on technical achievements, graphics quality, and gameplay quality. Sound gave you bonus points but did not hurt you.
It’s up to individual judges how they determine their score. The scores from the judges are normalized before they are averaged together.
For me, first I like to classify the game, as being either superb, good, fair, mediocre, poor, etc. I simply do this in my mind, and once I’ve decided that some game is superb, I can quickly say it deserves at least 90%, and then I compare it to other games that have 90% score and decide that it is better than this but not better than that, and come down to a score of maybe 93%. There are many factors I consider, as ra4king mentioned, graphics, ease of play, difficulty, technical factor, audio, gameplay of course, etc. However relying solely on these factors to judge a game is not good science either, because the game could have audio, nice graphics, technically impressive, but suck in fun and gameplay. So there are aesthetics and subjective factors as well.
But it isn’t accurate science. It is easier to do this for the top games, because they are fewer and easier to compare. But the lower you go in the rating, like 70-80%, it becomes much more difficult, because there are more games that fall into that bracket and comparing them is more difficult.
There are always ways to improve the judging process, but year after year the results seem to be alright. I did suggest in another thread to use buckets like “Superb”, “Great”, “Good”, “Fair”, “Mediocre” and “Poor”, decide on what games fall into what bucket, and then order the games. The judges would have to coordinate together and agree, and that is the biggest practical issue with it really.
then the final grade is (judge’s score 1 + judge’s score 2 + judge’s score 3)/3 ?
(normalized judge 1 score + normalized judge 2 score + normalized judge 3 score) / 3