me looking at my itch notifications 10 minutes before voting starts to see 100+ new submissions (we were only expecting like 50)
I reviewed all my previous jams and there is a correlation to how many people joined to how many people actually submitted. For every 4 to 6 people who joined a jam around 1 of them actually submit a game. You could possibly use this to predict how many submissions there will be once the jam ends.
It's also on a curve so the shorter and larger the jam, less people will submit
I was using a prediction, 1:10, standard for 1-week jams like this. Problem is I didn't account properly for audience, since a jam with a pre-existing audience of this size is (obviously now, but I guess hindsight is 20/20) going to have a higher submission rate, which it did, and that's my bad.
To be honest, the voting period was going to be this long either way. We have 10 judges and 129 entries, and finding new judges that are trustworthy enough in this case is extremely difficult. Only real effect of not quite being ready for the amount of entries is that I keep having to push the end date back to adjust for it. This should be the final delay as some of the judges are starting to make extremely quick progress.
I've participated to a dozen jams in real life and twice as a judge, and there's always a judging time of about 5 minutes, and can stretch a bit if the judges are hooked. It's my first time doing a gamejam online, so I have no idea if this is standard? If you ever do another one of these it could be added in the rules to be clearable in under 5 minutes for example. It helps games stay focused and polished instead of overstaying their welcome, but mostly it helps the judges' sanity!