Hi, your GitHub link gives a 404 Not Found error, is it maybe a private repository and you forgot to make it public when you submitted the game?
Siôn le Roux
Creator of
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Hi, welcome to the community discussion area, feel free to post questions or share updates on your game during development.
If you’d like some more active, faster-paced discussion, most of the Ebitengine community is hanging out in the Discord server, which you can join with this link: https://discord.gg/3tVdM5H8cC
Discord provides instant chat and you can ask about the game-jam or look for team mates in the #game-jam channel.
I understand that this rating formula exists to avoid the case where a submission with 2× 5 star ratings beats a game with 200× good ratings and this definitely makes sense for bigger game jams I’ve participated in with hundreds of submissions and thousands of ratings (like Game Off 558 entries, avg ratings 13.1, median 9). This is not our case.
I also read this interesting post https://itch.io/post/3962733 from a thread started by entrants complaining why they got lower scores, I’m grateful to be able to see what the formula is and understand the reasoning behind it. I also need to highlight this part of the post:
The average number of ratings is always larger than the median
This is probably often true but not always.
I’m organising a game jam this year for the second time. It’s for a smaller community compared to other jams I know like Game Off that gets hundreds of entries. 346 ratings were given to 23 entries (100.0%), the average number of ratings per game was 15.0 and the median was 16. Notably, the median is higher than the average.
Our entries are mostly submitted by people from within our own community, we talk with each other during the jam and we do our best to review all of the games. Last year’s final results were ordered by itch’s weighted ranking and compared the average score (which was displayed next to it) you could see that it produced (what we perceive as) some pretty unfair results. In many cases the Score and Raw Score are identical. However in some cases a game with an otherwise good score, but with slightly fewer ratings, dropped several places, e.g. from 2nd place to 5th or dropping out of the top 10. After comparing the results weighted and unweighted we agreed (including the first place winners of the jam) that we would have preferred it if the games had been ranked by the “raw scores” instead of the weighted scores, as that would’ve been more fair, better reflecting the actual ratings the games got.
I’ve searched for ways to disable this weighting in itch.io and found none, and as a jam organiser that’s a bit frustrating. Hopefully an admin can help us find a way to turn this off for our jam so that we can use the raw scores instead.
tl;dr: For the jam I’m organising our community would like to use the raw average rank instead of the weighted rank for the final scores, please help us set this? The jam: https://itch.io/jam/ebitengine-game-jam-2023
Surprisingly sophisticated game considering the format. It’s really well polished, I can tell you spent time on this, it seems well thought out. The first source file I opened looked similar to Go (which I like!) and TIL about the Umka language, thanks! I My favourite thing to highlight from the game has got to be the awesome transition effect when time slows down.
Impressed that you got a “3D” game into this 2D resolution, ray casting FTW. Props for sharing the code, I was surprised to see the maps were just an array of 1s and 0s, clever. Also +1 for the Linux build, and cool that you capped the FPS at 30, it gave the game an authentic Nokia 3310 feel. It was a bit unintuitive to know whether you’re succeeding in the fight or not, but generally it was a pretty well done game, respect!
Ok 2 things: playing it in this small resolution was nice but an option for fullscreen or resizable window would’ve been nicer, also I couldn’t find a way to quit the game from within it, I had to alt-Tab out and ctrl-C the process.
This was cute and fun, it took me a few attempts to figure out to run right instead of left but it was worth it. The animations and the intro are nice and I thought the grab timing mini-game was clever. One thing I noticed is that the scrolling is so smooth that it’s probably sub-pixel scrolling, not sticking to the 84x48 grid right? Anyway, all round a pleasant game to play, well done! Also, it was clever that the dog had a white outline to make it stand out nice and clearly against the busy background!
I made a GitHub template repo for anyone who wants to write a game with the Ebitengine library: https://github.com/sinisterstuf/ebitengine-nokiajam-template
It has:
- the 3 different 2-bit colourschemes to choose from
- a scaled up 84x48 window
- a square that moves up if you press space (replace this with your own game logic)
- github actions CI/CD config to build for Windows/Mac/Linux/Web and publish to itch.io
Based on the jam comments and also feedback from friends, our game Ezcort Mission takes about 30–45 minutes to play through, especially if you die a lot or you’re playing for the first time. But we have a new fastest time to beat as Thesryn, one of the gamedevs, has set the record of 14m 25s, can you beat it?
Pro tip: the best way to get a fast time is to completely avoid dying in the game.
Post a screeenshot if you beat our fastest time. If you manage to beat the boss and play the game all the way through please post even if you don’t beat this time because we’re curious how much gameplay time we’ve been able to provide. If you have a game you’d like to challenge us to beat a score or a time with let us know, we’re up for it!
Play the game here: https://sinisterstuf.itch.io/escort-mission
And go here to rate if you’ve already played: https://itch.io/jam/game-off-2022/rate/1775059
+1 to this, recently we submitted a game to the Github Game Off jam with my friends and it was annoying that I couldn’t pick the game engine Ebitengine from the list even though lots other engines were listed there and there were several other tools we used that were on the list, just not the game engine. I know we’re not the only ones who used this engine for our submission too this year. It would be really great if we could get Ebitengine on the engines list 🙏
Thanks to everyone who submitted games, now the relaxing, fun part starts: Playing each others games and rating them.
- Theme interpretation
- Graphics → the game’s visual design
- Audio → including music and sound effects
- Gameplay → how fun are the game’s mechanics
- Innovation → 😉
Taking the time to write constructive comments when rating is a great help.
You can see a list of submissions here: https://itch.io/jam/ebiten-game-jam/entries
Have fun, and looking forward to see the outcome in 2 weeks! 🙂
The theme for the event is: MAGNET 🧲🍤 今回のテーマはマグネット (磁石) です!
Here are some definitions from thefreedictionary.com:
- An object that is surrounded by a magnetic field and that has the property, either natural or induced, of attracting iron or steel.
- An electromagnet.
- A person, a place, an object, or a situation that exerts attraction: a village that is a magnet for tourists.
You could make an action game where the player or the environment has a magnetic effect, a puzzle game with magnetic pieces, or anything you want. Feel free to use these ideas as a starting point or go off in a totally different direction, you don’t even need to interpret it literally, what if magnet was really an abbreviation for… Magnificent Net? 😉 So get creative!
Thank you to everyone who submitted theme ideas!
Good luck, and have fun!
I’ll see if I can do something with the UI to make it clearer, there’s a lot of empty space because there were supposed to be more and more detailed maps but I ran out of time…
Thanks for the super detailed feedback, it’s incredible that you’re still reviewing these in June :D it was fun, thanks for hosting!
Hi, welcome to the community discussion area, feel free to post questions or share updates on your game during development.
If you’d like some more active, faster-paced discussion, most of the Ebitengine community is hanging out in the Discord server, which you can join with this link: https://discord.gg/3tVdM5H8cC
Discord provides instant chat and you can ask about the game-jam or look for team mates in the #game-jam channel.
Thanks for playing! The cost of construction or upgrade is shown in the top-right but it might not be obvious enough. The targeting is based on traditional Tower Defense games so I didn’t go into detail on it. Well spotted on the screenshot, that’s from a development build that sends a continuous stream of the same creeps that I used to test the map, maybe I should change it if it’s misleading.
Thanks for the feedback and congratulations on beating the game! 🎉
Thanks for trying it out. Figuring out how to pass the obstacles is part of the challenge; to get over the second hill try holding down for long and do a far jump from a bit further back.
Unfortunately I couldn’t play your game to return the review because it’s the Windows only and I don’t have access to a computer with Windows on it but from the screen shots it looks pretty cool!