itch.io

I want to preface this by saying that the result of this Jam is not that important. The most important thing in all game jams is getting to meet new people, learning new skills and developing teamwork/management skills and gamedev skills. 

The current rating system does not work well. For a public rating system (one without judges or jury) for a competition like this to work properly, it must ensure a fair rating count for all entries. That is because you cannot properly directly compare the average rating of two different entries which have had different review counts.

Problem 1 - Rating count gaps
Which of the two games should win?
A game with 4 reviews - all coming from a rigged Rate For Rate post - all of which are full stars in all categories is compared to a game with 100 reviews with varying reviews. On average the game with 4 reviews should straight up win the competition, since it has a perfect score. The other side - A game with 100 reviews might win by review count alone if the system is made in such a way to favor rating count instead of rating averages. There are many ways in which the winner might be calculated to compensate for review count gaps, however, the wider the gap between individual game review counts, the more unobjective and randomized the result is.

For a more fair rating system, it would be beneficial that all games get around the same amount of reviews. Now, that does not mean that each game should get 10 reviews for example and not a single more - it should just mean that there don't exist games with 2 reviews, while there are other games which have 200 reviews. The more the system has to compensate for rating count differences, the worse the system will be overall.

Problem 2 - Downloadable VS Mobile VS Web
The less clicks until game start, the more plays and ratings
Take a look at this post: A Very Long Rate for Rate post! PLEASE READ - Brackeys Game Jam 2025.2 community - itch.io
TL;DR; Nobody is playing or rating downloadable PC games. Mobile games have it even worse. Everyone is playing web games.

This is a massive issue. Web does not offer as many features as PC or Mobile. Both PC and Mobile games can be much richer in terms of game design than web. Web basically forbids all 3D game concepts, except the absolute simplest ones. Web games mean - No DirectX, No Vulkan. Please take a look at the steam store and even the itch io frontpage. How many killer games have been made for web in the recent years? 1? 2? Friday night Funkin is literally the only game I could think of that could rival standalone indie PC and mobile games in recent years.

Problem 3 - The Jam search filter system
The search filter system should be gone. Straight up, random only. It is so easy to sort by "Most Popular" and then boost the games which are already at the top. There are so many great games in this jam which I have personally favorited, which have like 7 reviews and 2 comments. Most Popular is a slippery slope. If you just get there once at the start, you will gain momentum and snowball into even more reviews. This further aggravates our first problem and serves to create even bigger gaps in the review counts of games.

Problem 4 - Rate for rates
This issue is self explanatory. It is just straight up competition rigging. Want to get your game seen? Just spam R4R posts every single day of the jam. The competition should reward game design skills, programming skills, art skills, sound design skills and teamworking skills. The rating categories reflect this, however, rate for rate posts only serve to reward people who spam the community tab. 

Problem 5 - Gray area win tactics
There are random ways in which the system can be played, which are not against the rules, but are obvious crutches that only serve to boost engagement for games that may or may not deserve it. There are plenty of these, but one of the most obvious ones is the following:
Game Jam starts -> Immediately publish an empty project (literally nothing) -> Your game is now on the TOP of the  "Oldest first" Filter

Possible solutions to these issues:
The insane solution:
The only way to play games is to have them served to players by an algorithm. No filters, no searchbox. "Play random game" as an only option in the jam menu. When that button is pressed, an algorithm choses the game with least current votes and serves it to the player. The player cannot play any other games until the served game is rated. This continues indefinitely. This will ensure that all games have the same review counts, will kill all R4R posts, will kill problems with advertisements and will also get rid of the "Nobody is playing downloaded games" problem.
I am aware that this is NOT going to happen.

The normal solutions:
Problems 1 & 3 - Remove the filtering system (permanently switch it to random), temporarily hide games with huge rating count leads.
Problem 2 - Boost downloadable games chances to appear.
Problem 4 - Ban R4R posts.
Problem 5 - Ban and prevent any activities which might serve to "cheat the system". This should be a competition of skill, not one of "Who can abuse the website mechanics the most". If you're on top of the "Oldest first", you should be there because you work thrice as fast as the competition and have actually finished first.

Don't take this the wrong way! I am endlessly thankful to itch and Brackeys for creating this game jam, it was a great opportunity for me to meet new people and expand my game dev skills. In my mind we have all already won by creating great games and expanding our skillsets. It would just also be really cool if the entire "competition" side of this was a bit more well thought out.

As we all get feedback for the games we make on here, which helps us grow, it is only fair to give some feedback to the ones who gave us this great opportunity in the first place as well.

Have a good one! (And please go download some games, there are Untitled Goose Games and Lethal Companies with like 4 ratings in this Jam lol)

Very cool idea! I had fun playing :p
My only criticism is that the physics are a bit stiff and the main character sometimes locks up and doesn't move left/right.
Great work!

Thanks a lot for the review and the feedback :)
I will look into making a step by step tutorial for the 1.1 version of the game.
The soul dough is not gained, at each level you receive a fixed amount of it. You can't gain any more.

Thank you for the review.

Still looking for ratings indeed. Will check your game out and rate it!
Ours is a luck based autobattler: HellBakers by NikX04, PixelTakkar, SovietSunflower, Viva, Mike
This is also our first game jam :p

Check this out, it's a strategy based autobattler: HellBakers by NikX04, PixelTakkar, SovietSunflower, Viva, Mike

Here you go ^^ 
HellBakers by NikX04, PixelTakkar, SovietSunflower, Viva, Mike

Pretty simple but pretty solid as well. The graphics are nice. Sound would have been a good idea as well. The gameplay would benefit a lot from more enemy variety and a bit of a higher difficulty to justify the upgrades.

I like the idea of risking leaving the cart to go level up. The combat is a bit underwhelming though, there is not much stopping your from just jumping every enemy and stabbing them to death 429 times. The graphics are passable. No audio though :p. If you want to build this game up, you should focus on making the combat more interesting. It could become a pretty cool game with some work, since the idea is pretty good :)

Beautiful work! This could be polished and extended out to be an entire game that I would straight up buy. As of now it doesn't have much content, finished it in like 10 minutes, but for something that was created in a week as a game proof of concept I love it! Great job, you should do something more with this idea after the jam!

I did an involuntary speedrun I think. Like I just went up the wooden planks on the wall and took the key, I think I won in under a minute lol. The art and sfx and cutscenes were among the best I've seen in the game jam and the game was funny in a weird "so bad it's good kind" of way. Great work! The only complaint that I have is that... well the game is one minute long XD. I'm going to go back to try to brute force the chest padlock. Edit: Didn't need to brute force it, figured out what the code was.

Cool tech demo! Could do with a bit more content :p

This crash is caused exactly by the newest AMD drivers. AMD driver update from August has completely broken AMD GPU support for the Vulkan Renderer in Godot. See issue: https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/10937

Ahh I see. For two months of game dev, an entire procedurally generated dungeon is an extremely cool and impressive thing to have created actually. I've myself worked on a project which had a randomly generating dungeon and implementing something like that was not easy. Thanks for the explanation of the minimap as well. Good luck in the jam!

Pretty cool that you made everything alone from scratch, kudos for that. I like the art and sfx, they fit the game nicely. The game is really easy though, so another enemy type or a bit of a higher enemy count could be a good idea to add into the game. Well done!

I like it! It's like a weird take on flappy bird or something like that. The visuals and audio are nice, the controls are nice. The idea is pretty good. Overall solid game, well done!

This played more like a prototype. The art is cool, could have done with a bit of sound as well. There was not much to do in the game though. I killed all the enemies and that was it <5 minutes of playtime. This could become a pretty cool game if expanded upon. I especially liked the minimap though, how did you manage to make it :o ?

So - I like the idea. The controls have a tendency to lock up. The music is not balanced, the main stage music is loud to the point of distortion, while the other music is quieter. The aspect ratio and scaling are incorrect. I played through a bit, this game could become pretty fun with better execution in terms of programming and level design.

Thanks for the feedback! Will try to make the UI feel more responsive.

Thanks for the review! A balance update to make the game a bit more difficult in terms of level design and fund generation is already completed :). However since the update window is already over it will be posted after the Jam ends.

Thanks a lot!

Thanks for the review :)
We are very happy you liked the game.

Cool project, reminds me a bit of Speedrunners. The physics were a bit stiff, so you might want to look into making them flow a bit better, but I liked it overall. Also, it might be a good idea to let the player see a bit more in front of them so they have more time to react.

Great strategy game, I enjoyed my time with it a lot. Creative idea and good execution. Bravo!

??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? Best game ever ?????? 
?????? ? What did I just play?
Add ability to pet the cats. Great work!

Pretty cool game! Great art and sounds, stable code. However it's literally just deal or no deal with a few upgrades lol.

Making a game in a week in C++ is sheer insanity. I am amazed you've managed to create anything at all, so you get a point for that. Nevertheless, this is not much of a game at all :/

As a fellow Godot programmer I have to inform you that the latest AMD pro drivers have broken Vulkan Godot support. See issue: Graphical mess on newest AMD driver (25.8.1), on VULKAN, works on 25.6.1 · Issue #109679 · godotengine/godot

Your game displays garbled graphics like the ones in the post above on my system due to this issue. 

 This issue can be fixed by going in Godot to project settings -> rendering -> driver  

Change the rendering mode from vulkan to d3d12. 

Solid game. A more detailed tutorial would be nice. For a week's worth of work, this is extremely good.

Great game! Simple but fun. Very polished as well.

Extremely good game and very interesting concept. Reminds me a lot of Terraria and Motherload. If only the Jam was a bit longer than a week so that you could've added more ores, progression and other content. This is the game I've rated the highest in all categories for now. Please expand on this concept!

Thank you for the feedback!

Thank you for the feedback :)

Thank you for the feedback. Will look into adding a fullscreen option and implementing proper scaling.

Thank you for the bug report. I've already pushed an update, however submissions can't be edited at this point in the game jam, so that sucks. Sorry.

Thanks for the feedback and kind words, it means a lot :)

Pretty cool minigame. It fits the theme nicely.

Basic but fun game :)

This took me back lol. These extremely simple 3d browser games were the best back in the day. 2 things: Viewport is gigantic, to view this (1920x1080 viewport I presume) game, you need a 1440p screen at least, I had to zoom out the page to view the entire game window on my 1080p monitor. Mouse sens is insanely high as well. Other than that I enjoyed the game. Not much to do but it doesn't have to have much content, just running around was fun.

I am amazed that this was an actually fun experience. One of the most creative ideas I've seen in the jam in terms of the actual game design. I loved the wrap around style stages. However, you really should've teamed up with an artist or at least used some royalty free assets XD. Technically the graphics aren't the end of the world, but having a different colored protagonist at least would've been nice since it is very difficult to distinguish the player stickman from the dark background. Also, the control scheme is not very good since most people wouldn't be able to use the arrow keys, spacebar and mouse at the same time. Going for WASD + Space + Mouse would be an upgrade.