Quote: "It's pointless, and quite rude, for you to say that the reason why you didn't do better is because the judges ruled unfairly."
I know, but how else can I voice my opinion about this without sounding like a "conceited and arrogant a-hole"? Besides I wasn't strictly referring to my game, and at least I didn't do a
Brick Break.
Quote: "But it wasn't really a "mini game", it was just a normal sized game."
This is a possibility but it's already been cleared up by Daniel that this was accepted as a mini-game so this isn't the issue, unless he's lying?
Quote: "I'm just throwing out an idea, but I think I remember seeing one judge was unable to play your game, so isn't that 1/3rd of your score out the window?"
Not unless the judges changed; as you can see
HERE all 3 posted comments about the game so I can only assume all 3 managed to play it just fine. Maybe you're referring to someone on my thread saying they were unable to play this and any of my previous games? But to my knowledge they weren't a judge. However, even if my or another person's entry is unable to run on any one judges' computer I think this should have no bearing on the final results unless the entry randomly fails to work 50% of the time on all PCs(thus being a stability issue and not a client's hardware/OS/whatever issue).
Quote: "I think the main things the judges were looking for was, easy to pick up right away, and a short experience with a high replay factor. I don't think graphics or media was a deciding factor in this comp."
And I never expect them to be, it's not like the quality of a game is inversely proportional to the quality of graphics(which I did spend time on of course, but by no means most of my time). I thought that maybe they simply wanted a game that as you say, can be picked up and played at any time, but doesn't the winning entry go against this? Not that it's bad or anything, as it's similar to mine in that if you play it once you've played it all pretty much(though I did include 2 endurance modes which should be rather hard to beat).
Also, while I wasn't there at the time, apparently Daniel went to the Devhat IRC and essentially 'cleared up' the results a few days ago and said that Labyrinth won because it was the only game all 3 judges liked? If this is the case then that's a stupid criteria, key, linchpin etc for winning isn't it? Shouldn't the judges do their best to objectively evaluate each entry? I for instance hate MMORPGs with a passion but if I had to judge one I wouldn't give it a crap score or otherwise bar it from winning simply because I didn't like it, I'd still be more than capable of objectively judging it for all its merits, after all, not everyone can like every game.
All I'm really saying is that the judging process needs to be as solid and ironed out as possible, there should be no room for any personal bias or whatever to hugely shift the balance in favour of anyone due to some arbitrary reason. To this end if there is no community voting as there are some issues with that there should be a clear set of judging guidelines with judging criteria and 'points' in various fields as per previous compos(and so people will stop bringing up graphics). In addition to publicizing the point breakdowns per-judge there should also be a fairly generous field for personal comments so we can understand why some things scored highly or low for various fields. This would allow us to see where the judges are coming from and not be left in wonder that maybe some of them were traumatized as a child by a red bowling ball hitting them on the head making them adverse to any such physics games.
But maybe I'm completely missing the mark and the judging wasn't: points = ( consensusOnLikingIt ? 1.0f : ( wasOriginal ? ( hasBowlingBall ? -9999.9f : -999.9f ) : 0.5f ) ) * humidity;