Seeing this bumped reminded me of questions I had.
if we have source control, can we make it public during the competition? This would be useful, as I’d love to know about bugs. Also, what about before? (I assume no for the second part. We want the comp to be the very first time people see the game. But just in case…)
Are cover art updates allowed, or will they be in the future? I didn’t have time for one. Alternately, I forget if they count towards the Petite Mort 4-hour time limit? This isn’t strictly game content, but it’s still part of the initial impression.
About competitors rating other games–as I understand, we can, and it goes toward the average. This has been the case for past EctoComps and it’s seemed to work okay. Nobody’s tried to slash everyone else’s ratings to boost themselves. But are there any specific rules of thumb e.g. try to get the average rating close to 3?
In a dark place. You open your eyes, and you are in a cold, dim, lonely place. Dark purple fog billowing all around. The stone floor has a faint purple glow too. The strange darkness reaches as far as the eye can see. But no, no, suddenly you can make a vague shape in the fog. It’s a person sitting in a huge throne made of rock. Her face is turned away from you, but you can tell that she’s a queen, dressed in long flowing purple garments. After a moment, she turns to face you. And that’s when you should start to get really scared. She says: “Come here, come here! Join in! Join the ECTOCOMP 2019!”
I feel like I’m being obtuse here: Which work of IF is being referenced?
Out of curiosity, is there any functional difference between leaving comments of a game’s submission page vs on the game’s actual page? Is either better?
Hi, I don’t know if this will be helpful for some people, but I wasn’t able to find a page that divided the Petite Mort and Grand Guignol. I hope this is helpful, for people who would prefer to play one or the other, but if not, I can delete it. Games arranged alphabetically.
Grand Guignol
Additional Tales from Castle Balderstone
American Maniac
Crumbs 2: the Will of the People
Journey to Omega Station
Once upon a winter night, the ragman came singing under your window.
Pumpkin Pie for Your Soul
Untitled Nopperabou Game
Village
When He Died
Whole Souls
Wild Party
Petite Mort
Be There!
Crimson Terrors of Delamay Manor
Day of the Dead–One Soul’s All Souls Procession
Limerick Night
Mindful
Quite Queer Night Near
Raishall
Reptile Room
Witch Beyond the Woods
Heh. I’d planned to review my favorite games on IFDB, but I never thought of directly looking there for which game was in which jam. I’ve been too busy trying to learn how itch works. It’s neat and intricate, and I suspect I’m missing some simple things that could help my experince immensely.
At any rate, I think just the act of clicking through all the games was sufficient to make me sit down with a couple. Sometimes you need to do any old thing to break the ice and get going.
I’m hoping to help push the average # of ratings over the next whole number, whatever it may be. It would be cool if we as a community could get it over 10. Looks like we fell 8 ratings short last year. It’s a long holiday weekend in the US, so maybe we can make a final push.
The itch.io platform is pretty interesting! Hadn’t tried it too much before.
Obviously some awkwardness maybe with how we’re repurposing it: it’s spread out across a lot of pages, I really wanted a way to just follow/bookmark the Ectocomp page, there’s no way to see at a glance the ratings I gave already, and yeah, no way to sort by the categories. I imagine a five-point scale would obliterate the meaningfulness of results for something like IFComp. I liked the idea of the comments sections, even if it’s again, spread out.
Also I knew Twine can work fine on there, but the parser entries seemed to work very well too. And it has to be a lot easier then setting up a comp from the ground up.
How did the authors find it? There seemed to be some confusion earlier in the thread.
I think that jams with judging period enters in a state where they drop the main filter for category, and put those there to manage the voting… so… more weirdness to the pot: when logged in itchio explicitly show filters of what you’ve voted and what not?
And the box of each game is ticked with a big simbol showing what games you have already voted.
Ah, sorry, you mean the whole numbers and stars… yeah, you are right.
Well, itchio allows playing in-browser any zip file that contains an index.html file. But it is not straightforward for people that are new to the platform. Also, Inform 7 by default creates a buggy template that does not work well at itchio (one must update the template in your own installation of I7).
All this is easy stuff, yes, but it is not straightforward. That’s why some people struggle.
Also, I’m pretty sure there are still Inform games at itchio that plays with the buggy template.
Next year I should create a post about “how to upload your IF at itchio”.
Another thing that is sorely missing (or that I haven’t found) is a spoiler tag for comments.
I found it slightly unclear whether you are supposed to add a game to itch and then to the competition or add the game directly to the competition. Having comments split between the game page and game’s entry in the competition page is suboptimal. That said, overall it’s been a rather smooth experience. I’m sure it’s also a ton less work for the organizer.
