Thought I might start by asking here–does anyone know if there was any vetting done of the non-standard formats? I’m coming up on The Curse and I feel a bit sketch downloading a windows executable that, per the blurb, may set off antivirus.
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The IF Comp team does check every game to make sure it runs and doesn’t contain viruses. I was part of the team this year and checked the Curse so I can confirm it was completely safe for me; the author has also used this engine for several previous games over the years which I’ve played and enjoyed with no deleterious effects on my machine. So I’m confident you’re safe to play it!
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I rate this response as “very helpful,” thanks!
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Screenshot references for next year how to make the histogram and scatter charts, because even copying flagrantly from 2023 was tricky. If whoever does this messes up next year when copying/pasting, I think it’d be useful to have a reference.
Bucket size 1 is so we don’t get weird numbers for the x-axis.
Data range will obviously vary … this is 2023’s but this year would be C2:C68, etc.
I can follow up with a step by step update of what to change. Of course the numbers after “C” and “D” will probably change next year.
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Something seems to be off with the spreadsheet’s conditional formatting—some of the games with one or two total reviews have stayed red instead of turning yellow/green. I don’t have the confidence to try to solve this, but flagging it so someone else can!
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As far as I can tell, the games still in red are below average in public reviews (although possibly not overall). I think that makes sense, or at least it could – can someone confirm if that’s intended?
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Ohhhh, the ones that are red have zero public reviews! I missed that when I was trying to figure out what was up. 
One a different note, ode-to-odes on Tumblr is Chloe Apple, who’s also posting reviews here, so I’m going to remove that column and add a “Chloe Apple” column instead.
Edit: While Lauren O’Donoghue is an author, her reviews are public, so her column should be moved, right?
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Ah apologies if I messed up here, thought there was a separate section for authors didn’t realise it was private/public! I’m away from my laptop at the moment so if anyone wants to move it go ahead, otherwise I’ll fix when I’m next at my desk
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We’re above 2 reviews per entry now. Go, us!
We’re also close to having everything reviewed & maybe that can happen this weekend! Then maybe we can get everything reviewed publicly.
It looks like some entries with no reviews already have some pretty good public discussion. But I thought I’d summarize things below for as of 9/7 A.M.
- Apothecary’s Assistant has discussion. The blurb indicates it does something with actual real-life time passing. So we may not want to rush to a review here!
- Miss Gosling’s Last Case is a relatively long game in Dialog. I tested and enjoyed it.
- Sidekick is listed as 2 hours but has invisiclues and a map, and I think I recognize the author’s name from the forum where they’ve asked some good questions.
- String Theory looks to have a strong blurb and cover image and seems to have serious content matter without being objectionable. So maybe people just need time to sit back and think about it before they have anything to say.
- Verses already has a discussion thread. So we’ll probably get a review of it soon.
Now for stuff not publicly reviewed yet:
- Civil Service, I can’t offer much on it, other than to say it’s more than just boring paperwork. It takes a different tack than Papers, Please.
- Doctor Who and the Dalek Super-Brain is a relatively short and tidy game in Strand. It didn’t take me much time to plow through.
- Dragon of Silverton Mine is well put together. Maybe people don’t recognize the author’s name and are poking around at entries they know more. I did not find it intimidating at all to work through, once I got started. Though it’s a web entry, it has a parser flavor.
- The Shyler Project, I’ve already reviewed in the author forum. It is not very long.
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Civil Service has a thread! Civil Service by Helen L Liston
And Lauren O. has publicly reviewed Shyler Project: Lauren O'Donoghue's IFComp 2024 Reviews - #11 by laurenodonoghue
I just moved Lauren’s reviews over into the public section, so the numbers should be correct now!
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Yeah, my Civil Service post was slight enough that I didn’t bother linking it in the spreadsheet, but feel free if you want. I could maybe expand it a little? I’m sort of reluctant to say much more about it: I think EJ’s “mesmerizing but very messy” is a good way to put it and you should just go play it. But maybe it does need a little more to help people make a decision whether to play, if they’re using reviews for that…
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Every game has at least one public review on the spreadsheet now!
Edit: Looks like a Claymorgue Castle review went from Public to Private, so that one still needs one!
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I believe both reviews for my game Dust are actually public.
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Yeah, not sure what happened there … D46 was hardcoded as 1, so I cut and pasted D45 to it.
Cutting and pasting D2 to D3:D68 and quickly undoing – and doing the same for C2 to C3:C68 – didn’t result in any changes. I didn’t check every cell individually, but it may be worth checking in a couple of weeks to see if anything else is hard-coded. There’ll probably be an abnormally low number somewhere.
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Ok, I should have collected all the missing threads for the index, and the reviews for the sheet 
Nope. It’s in the side author on the Google Sheet, because Lauren is an author
Some milestones:
(some already mentioned)
- Every entry has been reviewed by at least one person!
- only The Shyler Project and Return to Claymorgue’s Castle is missing a non-author review
- only The Shyler Project and Return to Claymorgue’s Castle is missing a non-author review
- The Public median is now at 2~!
- The Total median is now at 3~!
- We also passed 10 reviews (total) for 2 entries!
- ALSO 200+ TOTAL REVIEWS!!
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The Short Game Podcast episode 417: IFComp 2024 Part 1 - covering:
- 14:00 - The Bat
- 32:53 - Rod McShlong Gets Punched in the Dong
- 41:22 - You Can’t Save Her
- 45:18 - Forsaken Denizen
- 56:17 - King of Xanadu
- 59:55 - Quest for the Teacup of Minor Sentimental Value
- 1:05:39 - The Apothecary’s Assistant - brief preliminary discussion
I put these in the spreadsheet: can’t remember if we usually do that?
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We have in the past!
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Oh, did you do some magic to make the reviews get counted as public despite this? I thought everything in the “author” section was automatically counted as non-public (because Lauren’s originally weren’t showing up in the “public” count).
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No. Public might be confusing (I’m like 90% sure we had this convo last year in the Spreadsheet thread), but it’s the non-author judges count, not reviews that are public to all.
As like the general public, if that makes sense?
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Oh, that is very confusing… (And doesn’t really make sense to me? I definitely thought the point was to differentiate reviews everyone can read from the private ones.)
Like I don’t really see why this is significant… When Shyler Project has a review everyone can read, why does it matter if it’s by an author with a game in the comp?
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