I find that plenty non English speakers wrote in English for the jam. I've helped quite a few with typos and one typo was found on my side. If judges require for the game to be in English, I find that that should be added as criteria and not something after the fact.
That being said, I don't consider this jam to be objective, bur rather subjective. For me it was a bit of fun and a place to play with my passion, see if I can make something, if we went for an objectively professional lens:
- teams should not have been allowed, or there should have been a clear people limitor, as someone working alone will struggle to compare to a professional team of 5-10 people.
- sub-topic should have been thrown in on day 1 to make sure that games couldn't have been pre-planned or pre-made before the deadline. We're going on scout's honour here mostly.
- judging criteria must have been made clear from the getgo. For example, if a person is using a dark-pack versus a person that made a game with no graphics, versus a person that did all their graphics themselves (but they're not up to par to dark-pack graphics), if you are judging visuals, how do you compare here? Do you give the text novel person negative marks for their chosen genre? Do you give the dark-pack user extra marks because it is beautiful graphics, or do you also rate them down in favour of the person that went through the effort to make their own? With a regular judging choice of "add N/A to the category and then divide the score by amount of categories that the game qualified for" could mean that someone that took the time to make their own visuals will get penalized for doing so, as they could potentially score lower on those, while the title with "N/A" in that category would not have that score dragging down their average. Such issues are normally solved with dividing products into genres and therefore not comparing text adventures with visual novels, though the question on dark-pack graphics versus homemade graphics would remain.
- verdict on demos? Some games have so much potential (for example, look at Shadow play or Oslo by Night Act 1), but unless they win by the rules they will never be finished. However if you put them side by side with a finished product, how do you judge a product on its potential to be a finished product, versus an actual finished product? In my eyes this would mean that unfinished games are already not competing on auto, but they could be amazing finished games, though the authors will never be able to finish them, leaving all of them in a sad state of "could have - should have".
Now there's nothing bad in subjective jams! The only grievance I have here is that I tried multiple games that I wish could all be showcased on steam and I know that only 1 will. For example, I think that Blood Frontier should live as its own product. But I also would like A night at Hotel Lasombra to have its place too, even though the approach to the making of these two games and the themes was so incredibly different. And I'm nowhere done playing all entries myself, so I can't even say if I'll run into something else that will be super impressive for me.