Text Adventure Literacy Jam 2024 games released for playing and judging

Competitions
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Text Adventure Literacy Jam 2024 is now in full swing. We had a record number of registrations this year, but only 10 games were submitted by the deadline.

The games submitted were:

This yearā€™s competition had an optional theme of ā€˜Fairy taleā€™ and it looks like most games have been influenced by this, together with Japanese mythology, Greek mythology, Arthurian legends and nursery rhymes. Itā€™s nice to see that six of the games are written by first-time authors, but you wouldnā€™t know it from the quality of the games.

Just to refresh your memory, the Text Adventure Literacy Jam promotes games that are suitable for beginners and include a tutorial. This is a competition, not a jam, and relies on all you wonderful people out there to play and rate the games. Ratings are 1 to 5 stars for each of:

  • Story (plot, goal, prologue, atmosphere, gradual revealing of story, conclusion)
  • Writing (clarity, spelling, grammar, punctuation, capitalisation)
  • Puzzles (originality, fairness, consistency with the game setting)
  • Implementation (technical aspects, lack of bugs, responses to unanticipated commands)
  • Tutorial
  • Documentation (any external instructions, game page, feelies)

Please support all the authors who have sweated and toiled over these games for the past few months by playing and rating their games. You can see all the submissions here.

EDIT: Author for ā€˜A Princess Saves a Dragonā€™ updated. Reference to possible late entry deleted, as author was not able to finish it on time.

EDIT 2: Author for ā€˜Camelot Jackā€™ updated.

14 Likes
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Just out of curiosity, are the judges themselves beginners? Because otherwise Iā€™m not so sure if they could do a capable job of judging games meant for beginners.

2 Likes
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Based on some of the feedback on Discord, it sounds like some were beginners, but Iā€™d guess that most of the judges were experienced players. Experienced players are better able to rate the games, as they understand the judging criteria much better. Everyone was a beginner once, even experienced players.

1 Like
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I bothered a bunch of beginner players to play and vote (not all of them played all the games, but they said voted for a couple of the entries)!

I think if the voting criteria were more explicitly defined, it would probably be easier for newcomers to vote down the line!

Like instead of just:
* Tutorial
something more like:

* Tutorial
  ** Did it include a tutorial? 
      Did the tutorial help you understand how to play a text adventure game?
      (more tutorial relevant questions I can't think of now

or

* Tutorial
  * 1- Did not include a tutorial
     5- Tutorial helped explain how to play the game
3 Likes
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This is a very good point to consider for the next jam. As a matter of fact, I had the same feeling since, while comparing the votes of similar games, there was (IMHO) too much of a difference between the ranks awarded to the same criteria. It was as if, instead of playing all (or at least most) of the games and then ā€œnormalizingā€ the votes, ranks were given out according to the player/judge mood of the moment. I donā€™t think we will ever have control of this, but maybe itā€™s worth trying.

1 Like