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@djn3811: I'll be going too. There's a ton of meetups and information on the r/formula1 subreddit. I'd check there for info. There's activities every day starting Thursday.

Will be wearing my GB shirt to some meetups in case other folks are around.

Ehrgeiz menus.

I'm really happy someone made a great video illustrating the point.

@zandravandra: That's great. Ludum Dare has a system that's something like that. It favors exposing games by people who have rated others games a lot and have few ratings themselves. Itch even has a page that hooks into all that data http://ludumdare.itch.io/. So I imagine they were aware of it. I'm surprised there weren't already more ways to organize entries, busy developing other cool stuff I suppose.

@sykosis: Thanks! I've got too much other stuff to focus on continue working on this, though.

@ditshavoc, @squaglodyte: I wouldn't worry about it too much. If you look at how many ratings you received, you both got very few, which means the few you got are weighted very heavily. Only 1-3 ratings isn't a fair assessment. You got a bit unlucky that more people didn't happen to rate your games. The more ratings you get, the more it averages out and becomes accurate. Not to mention the numbers separating each placement are in the decimals. This same thing has happened to me before in other small-ish jams.

Perhaps in the future more notification/reminders that everyone should go rate the games are needed. Games with the most ratings only have 18, which is under 40% of the people who entered. It could also be a problem with itch's jam systems that it doesn't let you organize or prioritize by games least voted on.

So many games! A lot of them are outstanding too. I've played maybe half or a bit more. It's a lot. Excellent work everyone!

I didn't manage to submit my own so I can't rate them unfortunately.

My plan was to make a game where you have to play a different arcade board for both East and West. Competing against yourself to play both sides and try to make the coast you like succeed, but without just obviously tanking the other. Score in the levels would lead to getting more juice to travel across the cities on a country map to the final destination. I wanted the games themselves to be like Donkey Kong X Burger Time.

There was a lot I hadn't nailed down in my design and that was a big hurdle. Early on I changed my idea from 2d pixelart to 3d as well. I also got way into the weeds with CRT shaders, voxel art workflows, making a glowy shader and setting up MAME with every arcade game for reference... Thus, I didn't get any real work done except a glowy shader and some voxel tiles, which you can see in the images below.

Lessons learned, 3d art is more fun and interesting than plain old pixel art, but I never finish jams where I start down the path of 3d. It's too much of a timesink and distraction.

If anyone is in need of 3d character art I can help out with that. My own game will have simple enough art that I wouldn't mind making more.

I was planning to make a kart racer but started testing that out over the past couple weeks and it's way too much work for 9 days.

Instead I'm going to make something in the vein of classic arcade. Burger Time and Donkey Kong being the biggest inspirations.

Vinny played this one before Vinnyvania today. Gangstaz Halloween. It's a good jam.

@johnymyko: I did, I searched a bunch. Most were sans-serif. The only commonality I noticed was that fantasy themed games specifically use a lot of serif fonts. I think that's the key.

In terms of fonts in general, Japanese designers do love to use way too many of them and with wacky styling. NES Remix is one offender I really noticed. That game's menus and design are all over the place, and not just because of the multiple games contained within.

Japanese TV shows also have tons of fonts and text on screen at all times. That's one I've wondered about, why there's always so much text on the screen and subtitling during Japanese tv shows.

Do you have any specific examples? I definitely haven't noticed any overuse of serif fonts for roman characters. Looking at many japanese and japanese localized games I own they use sans-serif just as much or more. When I think of Japanese typography I think of using huge gigantic lettering and trying to use 30 cutesy sans-serif fonts at once in all different colors.

Maybe it's just the type of thing you're looking at? If you're just looking at fantasy jrpgs maybe they're trying to be fancy and think serifs = fancy. Like fake british accents in western fantasy movies/shows/games.

Less open worlds in general unless it's really core to the design and style of the game. You can have expansive game environments without being an open world of mostly pointless empty space. Tons of games prior to last generation managed it. It's become a trendy thing to be open world even if it's not really a critical part of the game's philosophy and design.

I'd like to see more environmental variation as well. Like MGSV where you have multiple big maps in different areas of the world, that aren't necessarily continuous. San Andreas did a good job too and even crazier, it was continuous.

What I'd really love to see is more games return to the old JRPG style overworld map. Free exploration on a planet scale but exaggerated. Then you zoom in to the 1:1 scale environments.