The Future:2030 Competition Discussion

Hi everyone! My jam entry is called Night Strike Infiltrators. It's a fast paced platformer/shooter.

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/640132

Enjoy!

And here's the game's plot:

Personal log 04/06/2030

Everything in our world has changed since the World War III. Colossal casualties, devastated continents and ruined ecosystem gave the opportunity to the most wealthy and powerful corporations to take away all the power and influence from the weakened governments. Now the most valuable resource in our world is information. Whoever owns information, owns the entire world, you know. I've become a member of Night Strike infiltrators and it would be my job to obtain some other people's secrets...

And some screenshots:

And even a walkthrough video:

Tom next time you have one of these you should tell people the voting won't be taken into consideration, so people don't vote down the competing games. After the competition all the Construct2 games will have ranks below what they would have without the competition.

Yeah, it's really sad that people would do that anyway.

You're right guys. There are no 4+ games besides lots of really good projects. It seems that some of the competitors and their friends are definitely downvoting other games on purpose.

It is sad to see so many good games with scores under 3. Many of them could have reached the frontpage...

It is already hard to publish a game in NG/Kong with all the sponsors downvoting the competition to get a frontpage. If you are also downvoted by jam competitors, the results are catastrophic.

For some reason I was less surprised when I saw a fairly low score on my game since I assumed newgrounds players were mainly interested in playing parody remakes or really high quality games. In which my game seems to fulfill neither of those requirements. I do believe that some games on the site with a 2 star definitely deserve higher, and if people are willing to down vote the games for a dumb reason such as winning a contest then that really is a shameful way to put other games down....

But to be honest, I really don't know newgrounds player-base or what their players want. I came across some other nice flash games on their site and they only have a 3 star which has me puzzled.

They seem to just be harsh on rating too. I mean I have some good comments from people saying things like "They like it, it's just hard" and then give me a 1.5 or 2 star . *Shrug*

Sponsors downvote other games too. It has happened me with flash games.

It is also easier to get a higher score on Kongregate... You can´t vote 0 on Kong.

Don't let the haters get you down. This was a challenge and if you submitted a game you met that challenge.

Just like everything in life you can't make everyone happy and you'll never be happy yourself if you try.

If you sat down with an idea for a game and submitted that idea in game-form by the deadline you're already a winner in my book.

They seem to just be harsh on rating too. I mean I have some good comments from people saying things like "They like it, it's just hard" and then give me a 1.5 or 2 star . *Shrug*

Just saw your game on the game jam and noticed that it was one of the higher quality ones. I think you should maybe add a longer timer for the player, other then that it looks well polished, it's a shame that people would lower the ratings because of difficulty. It's certainly worth higher then a 2 star.

I guess there really isn't much we can do on our end.

Yeah, it's no big deal to me. My plan was to get all the mechanics worked out and get it uploaded. I only had about a week to really work on it, but I am happy where it ended and I look forward to building onto it .

Thanks for nice comments.

I'm noticing a few odd votes on my game too, with strange justifications. It might just be the community though, I've not been there before now.

I think future competitions could do with some much more concrete guidelines. Not just to better explain that votes from other users account for nothing, but also how "updates" work. I've just read back through this thread and seen people are continuing to work on their submissions after the deadline, not just with bug fixes but full-on content updates and mechanic tweaks. Doesn't that defeat the point of working to a deadline? What about those of us who worked to that deadline and then stopped - now we're learning that we could have continued adding content that we had to cut last minute, and further polish our entries?

At the end of the day, I entered for the experience and to push myself out of my comfort zone (fantasy-based settings). But for future competitions, we definitely need to set some more rigid rules, because I'm now completely confused about the point of a deadline

In fact, you need to read the NG Forum topic about the jam.

TomFulp gave indications about that (and i saw them 2 days ago)

You can update your game as you want (if I understand well). There is not really a "deadline" for development. Maybe it's only here for late contestants, you can't add a game after this date for the jam, but that's all.

And results are only based about the jury experience, not about votes. It was described on the NG topic too.

All I can see in the rules/instructions from both the C2 topic (this thread) and Newgrounds topic (here) are that the deadline is June 15th. That's why I'm confused about so many people continuing to work on and improve their submissions, even a full two weeks after the deadline Wish I'd known this was allowed, but I don't see it mentioned anywhere in the rules sections on either site.

I agree, it seems a bit confusing to allow continued work on a project when the whole idea of a jam is to get it done right within the time limit.