The story is genuinely interesting. The art is so well-made, I love it. But sadly, the game doesn't last for 20 seconds. Although I do understand that it's just a game jam. It just feels unfair that other games that don't last for 20 seconds got disqualified, but this game doesn't get the same treatment :/
Viewing post in Girl in the Attic [Remastered] jam comments
My game was originally immediately got disqualified. But after a couple of days of exchanges with the jam's hosts and a few requests, it was allowed to be added back into the jam's index since technically you can finish the game within 20 seconds by simply skipping the "novel" part of this "visual novel" game.
It was a very debated thing, and yes, it was immediately disqualified at first.
This is a lax jam in terms of start time and content reuse so there’s very little we have to determine if a game was even made for the jam or not, or if it’s someone just submitting any old project and not caring about the jam theme.
Unfortunately, we’ve received dozens of such entries and had we not had some enforcement you would now be seeing a flood of low quality, irrelevant entries burying the hard work of people who actually did make something for the jam.
This game was ultimately allowed back in because it was very clear that it was made for the jam, was a product of significant effort, a responsive author, and had positive feedback from those who had already played it.
We are trying our best to be as fair and evenhanded as possible while preserving the integrity of the jam.
If anyone feels their game was unfairly excluded they have been invited to come discuss it with us, and in doing so we would be strongly inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt.
So far, no one has
As Strange Girl mentioned, the game was disqualified initially but we allowed it back in after some discussion. The game was made for the jam and while there is no 20 second limitation in the gameplay, the developers did attempt to make the game playable in 20 seconds and display a timer at the end.
Our intention is really only to disqualify games that make no attempt to engage with the jam's constraint, not to make judgements on how well a game satisfies the constraint (that part is up to you, the players, commenters and reviewers). The reasoning is that the jam should be friendly and low-stress for all the participants and we don't want people worrying that their game might get removed for some minor reason.
The games we removed from the jam were, for the most part, obvious spam. In cases where there is some doubt, we messaged the author to notify them that the game does seem to have any relation to the jam and gave them the opportunity to make changes. In some cases they did. In many cases, we did not get a response.
Sorry for the long post :D