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This is great; only intended to stream file 1 but got close to finishing file 2... very much stuck toward the end of it though on some of the times! 

Hi folks; well done for all of your hard work on the jam games, and particularly for the playing and voting. 4000+ playtests for 100 is amazing!

I'm going to be making a follow-up video over the next week to talk about the jam, what went well, some of the entries etc. I'd like to collect some short reflections from (in the form of video or audio files) which I can incorporate. 

If you'd like to contribute, please take a look at this form, as it has all of the details/instructions on what's required. Basically I'm asking you to give a very short account of one thing you learnt from working on your game, and a thing you learning from playing/judging another game. I'd rather focus on very specific learnings, so I'm keeping the time limits for these very short. 

Nate R. has also set up this other checking spreadsheet which will let you check if anyone has already planned to comment on the same game as you. It doesn't matter if some games have 2 or 3 commentators, but it might help you make a choice between different games. 

The deadline for submitting audio/video is Tuesday 2nd. I may take a look after this point, but I'm probably only going to be able to use a maximum of 20(ish) pieces anyway, so I'll prioritize stuff which comes in early and where the audio is decent enough quality. 

- Joe

If you had read the rules properly you would understand both the rule you broke, and the fact that there are prizes. The scoring system is meant to determine who wins them. There was a category for deciding if the game was intuitive or not [e.g. "spirit of the rules according to other judges"] but "no controls on game description page" was a very clear explicit rule, and I don't want your other jammers wasting time judging games by devs who decided not to abide by the same rules as everyone else.

I'm pretty sure it's been locked/blocked since last week. I gave people a few day's grace to fix crashes and major blockers 

this seemed cool, but had to disqualify as you listed the controls on the game page instead of teaching them in the game. 

Had to disqualify as it didn't follow the rules "On the itch.io page for your game, the game description should be a maximum of two sentences describing the game in thematic terms (e.g. who the player character is, what they're trying to do etc.). The game page should not be used to provide an external tutorial or guidance for how to control the game." You were meant to teach the controls in the game itself and not use the description page to tell people the controls.

Hi folks,

Given that we've had so many entries, I've extended the voting period until the end of Wednesday (midnight GMT). This will make sure I have time to stream the rest before the voting finishes. Well done to everyone who took part, there's some great stuff here, and I hope everyone has had some good learning takeaways.

I'm particularly proud of the >3000 playtests/ratings which we've had. As great as it is to practice gamedev, I really feel like the mutual playtesting and crit is where a lot of the game design learning happens. I certainly feel like I've learnt a fair bit from playing your games so far. 

Needed to draw a line at some point; gave folks a few days grace on that stuff.

Not for the first stream or two, no. 

Going from 09:00 GMT until around 12:00 tomorrow. More streams to come in following days.
It's hard to predict how many game's we'll get through but I'll be starting from the bottom of the Least Rated list here: https://itch.io/jam/indie-game-clinic-collab-jam-26/unrated

Hey, good question. I'll to pre-arrange it a little bit and post something here later today.

I've already been through and played some games offline; namely the download-only games which have had way fewer people look at them. I didn't want to stream those in case there were a bunch of technical issues. 

I definitely want to make sure I play and rate all of the games, and I will try to stream all of the browser-based games. Tomorrow [Friday 22nd] I'll have around 3 hours free, maybe longer if I start a little earlier than usual. I'll probably pick a set of browser-based entries which have fewer votes and start with those, and then either do it randomly or jump around a bit. I'll be reacting live on stream but putting my actual scores in off-record so it doesn't influence anyone... although I hope it wouldn't anyway! 

Came very close to disqualifying this one because of the debug text still being visible. There's a neat idea in here and I could see it being a satisfying thing to interact with, but even when I got the guns to assemble it felt like I wasn't able to do the tactile fun part of the game because it just sort of happened without me. 

Really enjoyable to interact with, if a bit lacking in a clear goal. I was kind of hoping the game was going to ask me to name the pieces and that's what those grey slabs were [signs]

This game looks great, but I think it suffered from the "the dev knows how to play" problem; when you're a new player and you're hearing that "error" sound dozens of times in one run it's quite painful. I'm not really sure what skill this game wanted me to test or get good at but I didn't feel like the timed challenge element was making the game fun. Couldn't find the fifth object.

a little bit hard to work out what we're supposed to be doing here. some cute art, but the interactions were unclear, didn't have much feedback etc. Hard to understand what my goals were or how to achieve them. Just like real life I guess. 

Very cool. Feels like it could be part of a larger mech-themed Shadow of the Colossus style boss rush kind of game. Took a little while to work out you could attack the thing you were tailing. A version which played around with rope slack/snagging physics would be fun to try out

This was cool! I definitely feel like "Golf+" has legs in general (check out Greener Grass Awaits if you haven't already).

It was hard to tell why the golf controls were so whacky before the [spoiler] but afterward it made total sense. The artstyle mix is charming, doesn't totally work but feels like it could do with more work. The high end 3D stuff did tend to slow my machine down a fair bit and in the 2nd hole when things got a bit more manic it was a little slow and hard to aim etc. 
Fun idea, reasonably well executed. Also appreciate all the little bits of care which went into the UI and helper mechanics so I didn't get lost. 

This was really lovely! I've just been going through a lot of the download-only entries to make sure they get played and rated and feedback from someone and this feels like the strongest game I've looked at so far.
The mood and atmosphere is great; I only didn't rank it higher for sound because it wasn't made within the team, but the music choice was pretty perfect and made it feel like a chill little virtual-pet type experience. I got up to the point where I was building the boat and then I started to find that some of the ui didn't match with the items I needed to actually find, and also it became less interesting once I was just fishing for junk and waiting for the right item to show up.

This entry felt like you really understood the spirit of the jam and focussed on a very limited set of interactions, and a clear implicit goal, and then putting the time and effort in on UX/visual communication stuff for the mechanics. Great. 

There's some cool stuff in here. At first I kind of rolled my eyes a little bit at "use the blue weapon on the blue" etc. rule, but then when I saw that we were upgrading each weapon independently it felt like a more interesting idea. I appreciate that when you get to the minigun the little moment of spinup makes the weapon a little harder to use. 

I'm not sure we needed the player to be one-shot-kill for the game to work.

I think the mechanic of needing to prioritize one enemy type to upgrade the "lagging behind" weapon was personally more interesting than "you can't shoot blue with red or vise versa" [which would also be harder to justify in a larger game too; it makes sense quite quickly mechanically but it would be hard to tie into a theme/backstory beyond colour coding... this is why elemental stuff is often easier to do in fantasy than SF, I think]

Unfortunately this is not playable. I'm taking it out of the rotation so people don't waste their time downloading it. 

This was cool! I think in terms of intuitiveness, the area which was weakest was "goals". I could understand what I needed to do moment to moment to control the character, but there wasn't a clear sense of where I was trying to get to, which is a key thing in 3D level design.

I rated this lowest for "interesting/compelling challenge/puzzles" but high for "would I buy a longer version". I did this because I think the overall creative direction and mood of what you made showed a lot of promise, I think a game with this approach to art style, audio, and general mood could do very well. I just don't think the actual platforming was interesting enough... and after a long fall and failing to land in the right place to collect whatever the red thing was, I was pretty much ready to quit.

The problem with making a game which appears to be really chill and relaxed, is that if the challenge design is then actually quite punishing and harsh, the chill stuff will feel like it's mocking the player. 

Unfortunately I think this game was just trying to be something a little bit too complex; too many possible types of interaction (with not enough guidance/feedback for each). Lots of signs telling you what to do with what, but I was moving things around, putting them on boards etc. pressing E all over the place and none of the food appeared to be processing. 

Games are fractal. Good quality games are made up of tiny good quality minigames. I think a good reference point for the type of thing you were trying to do "i.e. Overcooked but first person" would have been something like the potion brewing minigame in Kingdom Come Deliverance 2; a few different things to do, but without all the dead time wandering around between stations, and too many operations which don't have any animation/feedback etc.

This was amusing.

Although you did show that it was Space to pick up things, it wasn't very intuitive in-situ because there was no indication of when i was close enough... and it also didn't really justify itself as a mechanic because it felt so cartoony I may as well be running through things to collect them.

The music etc. speeding up as the game advanced was funny but by the final 75% of the bar the camera was quite unmanageable. I wasn't really sure why stuff was jumping out of the pot etc... it was all "fun" is a loosely anarchic silly way but as a game which seemed like it was meant to be skill-based it didn't seem super fair or like something you could really get better at by practicing. 

This entry felt like it didn't understand the spirit and intention of the rules; to try to get developers to focus on making something intuitive.

You seem to have interpreted the rules more as a challenge, i.e. "what's the most original unique thing you can do with these restrictions" rather than just "make a interesting short, small game which people can pick up and play, and try to avoid spending time overcomplicating it with things which need to be overtly explained". 

There's too much in the game which needs to explained through pop ups etc, and that's an indicator that it's not very intuitive. 

There's some stuff here I really like but it didn't make me want to keep playing much after failing.

The art is charming and I particularly like the backgrounds and some of the enemy designs. The way the character gestures left and right as they switch directions is really funny and genuinely made me smile.

The bubble mechanic didn't feel very intuitive, the room which "taught" it didn't seem to require me to use it, so I never really learnt what it was for. I like the "pollen" pickups as a concept and they felt nice to receive. 

My biggest control complaint was firing upwards, which depending on which horizontal direction you'd previously moved in... this could be a neat control quirk to master in a larger more complex game but here it felt very frustrating compared to just letting the projectile go from the centre of the character upward. 

Jumping felt a bit floaty and like it didn't have much character. I think later I probably needed the bubble mechanic to get past some environmental challenges but I just didn't know how to use it by then.

There's some really cool stuff here! I liked being "on the table", and the bouncy movement there made me think a little bit of when you're a kid and you "walk with your fingers" and then imagine your hand is a little person. Art and sound mood are genuinely great. 

I had to cut my playthrough a little bit short because it's possible to fall off the foot of the bed and get stuck behind a chair, and I didn't want to replay the section before that. 

I thought you had some neat ideas about making objects noticeable in a way which fit the world, e.g. the painty handprints, glowing building blocks etc. Didn't really appreciate the jumpscares as to me it feels like the lowest form of horror...  They sort of made me not really invested in continuing because it felt like I was being punished for what should've been "a-ha" moments. Feels a little bit poor taste to use it in a game where the theming suggests child neglect etc... this is Roald Dahl kind of territory but I think the game would've been more interesting if had kept that creepy theming without pulling it over into full jumpscare territory (which to me suggests a "for kids" horror game like FNAF rather than something more mature).

Same. I had a missing file error. 
Unfortunately the grace period for fixing bugs, adding web builds etc. is now over. I'm going to disqualify this submission just to prevent it showing up in people's voting queue and therefore wasting judges' time. 

Hey.
I'd like to think that a situation where the judge already understood the game because it was a total copy of another game would only score moderately for "intuitiveness", because the game is not actually teaching itself, it's just "already known". I would say the kind of example you're giving would also score lowly on the "would I want to play a bigger version of this game" criteria. So they type of thing you're worried about is already guarded against twice in the scores. 

if it's in, it's in

it seems to have been accepted and is accepting votes, so sees like there's nothing to worry about

Hey Kristof - I couldnt find another way to get this link to you, but try this https://itch.io/jam/415872/add-game/4586583/10959377?token=WrxQx5FjvkNLVhF2C9zo5...

sure

there’s a good chance it violates the AI one. That’s also a cover of a Billie Eilish song, so I would avoid it either way.

not super time consuming to load a real “meow” sound (not a human saying “meow”) into a midi controller and make something new; look on the “looking for teams” list for audio folks. 

Fine, just make sure their name is on there and what they did

Work on that basis that even if I were to say "yes" some of your judges might feel that's unfair, so I would be careful of pictograms 

Try to find a way to signal the end without using words. 

That would be ok, yep. 

she about to bust some moves?

Yes.