What is the purpose of a game jam if the judges can’t even be bothered to play the games?
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Anonymous for a good reason 
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Hey everyone!
We really appreciate your comments and concerns. We’d like to assure you that all judges strictly follow the evaluation criteria and judge every submission equally. Please keep in mind that the panel of judges is anonymous, and we have several processes in place to validate specific criteria from each entry, which may result in different playtime.
Additionally, we’d love your help shaping our future challenges. Please make sure to also cast your opinion in our satisfaction survey!
Thanks,
Developer Engagement Team
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i hate to be contrarian, but i fail to see how these “specific criteria” justify not seeing what the entire submission has to offer? additionally, i don’t see this as an issue of “playtime” per se, but rather an issue of the (presumably) judges glancing over submissions by, what i can only assume to be, first impressions; after all, if the playtime was short but the game was still completed, there wouldn’t be much to complain about
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so who copied every single portal game to exist on Roblox??
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Congratulations to everyone!!! Can’t wait for next gamejam!!
Congratulations to all! It’s a shame my team and I haven’t managed to finish our submission, but participating was fun nonetheless <3
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Interesting, I see my game’s badge in the image you posted (Late Night Gaming). I think the intro scene to my game takes about a minute.
I’ll be optimistic and assume my game was played enough to make a solid judgment. The challenge was fun regardless! Congrats to the winners and honorable mentions.
For my game I used a 2D framework to make my game both 3D and 2D! The actual gameplay is very short because I was solo, and I had too much fun working on the 2D physics.
My submission: Late Night Gaming - Roblox
See you all next year!
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Do we all get items for participating?
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very fun the gravity changing level!
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I don’t know if it’s morally correct to have a webhook tracker in a roblox game if the judges are anonymous. Although it is concerning that some submissions may have been glanced over due to shortened attention span. I would say on average the time it takes to go through the entire submission’s content would be 20 minutes (from my experience) and there were around 1000 submissions!
Here is something I will expect to see for the next game jam:
- Collecting player data will be forbidden.
- Criterias for judges will be changed.
- Judges should use alt accounts (advised)
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Considering it’s OUR games, we should be able to implement the logs we want to. That said, I agree that judges should be using anonymous alt accounts next time.
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Joining into this I already knew I was not going to win (let alone get mentioned lol), considering all winning submissions were done by more than 1 person, I’m already put at a disadvantage.
Still, I did not join this to win. This was fun and it was a cool learning experience to see how I could come up with a game idea & plan to execute it in time.
This was my submission: COMPLEX - Roblox
Hope to see you all next year!
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I know examples of collecting player info which improves gameplay (Jailbreak tracks the most travelled route and all player info is anonymous). Which is okay since it provides a better experience for the players.
However having a log of who joined your game is where it becomes concerning since it’s being done without the player knowing. I am surprised that roblox doesn’t have this in community guidelines yet (unless i am missing something…).
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I think you can get terminated for using discord webhooks in any capacity. I’ve seen that rumour thrown around and promptly removed any and all webhook functionality from my projects, just in case.
But this doesn’t eliminate the possibility of implementing a log using a datastore or something similar.
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If that was true we wouldn’t have HttpService
Next time I compete in a game jam I guess it’s advisable to focus less on visuals since that took up most of our time. I think it still turned out pretty good for how much time we had.
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its only against tos if you actively share that data with someone
keeping it private is completely fair game
also how would someone even go about enforcing the first point???!!!
there is barely any information being stored about the player, simply a representation of how far along the player progressed in the game, so this is far from sensitive information, but in a panel of judges intended to be anonymous, i can see where you’re coming from. i don’t exactly see this being very problematic though, as we often use this data to gauge where players get stuck etc. to improve our own submissions too
i don’t think the potential time it would take to finish each submission is very relevant either, there’s always other options available: either they could allocate more testers like previously mentioned, or they could be testing them to their full capacity even at the cost of delayed results—otherwise we couldn’t exactly call it fair judgement
this is not a decision we just randomly made either; we’ve had our suspicions for a while now and consequently implemented this to investigate—as such, on august 18, 2024, around 5 days after the inspire challenge had ended, we brought it up privately regarding what seemed to be a tester who joined our submission but did not complete it (playtime and join logs is the only relevant data here)
following this, a day after we had sent our message, more testers appeared to join:
to me they appeared to test the experience more thoroughly this time, and we ended up taking second place for technical quality, but of course this could simply be coincidence, so i’ll let you take this information how you will; the point is, there appears to be varying degrees in which a submission can be tested, and as it stands right now, we have no way of knowing why or how this is the case, since the judging process is kept (intentionally?) vague
i realize i may be overstepping boundaries with this, but i think i am within reason here—after all—i’d think a situation like this can undermine the efforts the teams who participated put into their submissions
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