I'll preface this summary by first saying we are very proud of the game we created for Brackey's Game Jam 2025.1! We did not win, nor did we even make it in the top 100 games. By the end of the voting period, there were 2,199 entries eligible for scoring. Overall, our game ended up ranking #650 of 2,199. We had 66 ratings this time and our overall raw score was 3.1 out of 5. This was significantly better than our previous submission, which had an overall raw score of 2.5 (which was then adjusted to 1.3 based on our lack of adequate ratings.)

Looking at the comments left by the wonderful people that rated our game, paired with our mediocre overall score at the end, we can pull some new lessons to add for future consideration. The top repeated criticisms for Trouble With Tetras were: not enough clear communication to the player about the objectives, high difficulty, too long to finish the game (15 minutes), and a handful of technical issues that either resulted from browser limitations, unusual bugs, or accessibility issues. The top compliments on the game were: enjoyment of the sucking up/pushing of the tetras mechanic and appealing visuals and audio, and the building up of tension/difficulty over the course of the game for the niche players that enjoy this type of stressful active management simulation.

Why context matters

The criticisms (and the compliments) should be taken with a grain of salt and considered within the context of the game jam situation. Looking at the raw scores for the specific categories, the area in which we ranked the lowest (992/2,199) was "enjoyment." I am certain that the reason for this was the fact that our game does not appeal to a "general audience." Since all the raters were also developers submitting games, very few of the raters purposely selected our game to try out based on the genre or any other type of filter. For most of the raters, the game was simply too far outside their gaming preferences. The second lowest ranked category (716/2,199) was "gameplay" and I think it's pretty safe to assume we scored low in that category for all the same reasons. That said, a few raters actually did compliment us on the gameplay and enjoyed the experience. They very likely happened to fit into the specific niche audience we would be targeting. By the time we had feedback from our early playtesters, we had already concluded that our game wasn't likely to make it in the top 10% in the context of the game jam because it was: too niche and too difficult. The end results simply confirmed our suspicions.

In addition to a niche gameplay style with higher difficulty, our game was apparently "too long" for most raters to experience the entire scenario. Before the voting period, I would have been surprised if we were told that the game is "too long." But now I can see why the context of the game jam has a tremendous impact on how the length of the game affects the score: most raters want to move onto the next game within 5-10 minutes; maybe sooner if the game they are playing is too far outside their preferred style. Had our game been more "general audience friendly," then I doubt we would have been criticized for a 15 minute play. Because of the niche appeal and high difficulty, the 15 minutes to "win" actually created a little bit of a negative feedback situation: players that already found the game somewhat frustrating would also complain that it took too long to reach a successful ending, resulting in an even lower rating.

The lesson here is one that is truly very contextual: if you want to end the jam with a competitively high scoring game, then it must appeal to a very wide general audience or be short enough for those with the lowest attention spans to want to finish the game before rating it… and, ideally, BOTH.

A big lesson in accessibility

From my perspective, the biggest lesson from this jam is that we will need to put more effort into accessibility for our future games. It is too easy to confine our design goals within the context of our own experiences, unintentionally limiting the playability of our game to those who share our native language and/or keyboard layout. A few of the raters that left us very valuable and specific feedback brought this to our attention. We have taken WASD as movement controls, paired with the same-hand accessibility of "R" as fairly standard/common 3D controls. We totally forgot that QWERTY keyboards are not the only keyboards used by PC gamers. To remedy this, we will do our best to include a way for players to map their preferred controls in any future games. The issue of non-native English players might be a challenge in future game jams, due to time constraints. In this situation, it could have been addressed by providing a more interactive tutorial instead of relying on the player to read text-heavy info-charts near the individual system consoles within the game. The criticisms were fair and very constructive.

A few users reported other issues, such as feeling a little motion sick from the camera, longer than expected load times when changing scenes, occasional crashes when a scene failed to load properly, and a few failures to capture the mouse properly after interacting with consoles. Some of these issues are, unfortunately, not 100% preventable. Sometimes they come down to player expectations and/or error. The easiest "fix" for those kinds of bugs is providing a downloadable version that will not have to work within the limitations of the browser. But the camera issue is something I hope we can provide settings for in the future. We've worked pretty hard on trying to find the sweet spot for camera movement, but there's not a 1-size-fits-all solution.

Total number of ratings might not matter as much as we initially thought

After the first day of the rating period, we were feeling a little bit overwhelmed by the race for ratings. We casually estimate that roughly 90% of the community threads in the forum were "rate for rate" requests or less explicit attempts to draw in high numbers of ratings. Since we failed to draw the minimum number of ratings during our first game jam experience, we knew it was important to participate in the exchange this time. Between the two of us, we gave out 96 total ratings and received 65 in return. Out of the 96 we rated, there were 6-10 games that we BOTH rated (giving 2 independent ratings to 1 game in those cases).

We made an assumption that games with higher numbers of ratings would likely have a better chance of receiving a higher overall score. Now that the voting period is over and scores are tallied, the reality doesn't confirm that assumption. Out of the TOP 20 OVERALL GAMES in this jam, 15 out of the 20 had less than 65 ratings. What actually made the difference for those at the top, was that they consistently received exceptionally high individual ratings in all or most categories. To highlight this, we can look at the game that scored #3 overall. That game received only 21 ratings - just ONE rating above the absolute minimum of 20 required for competition at the top. That game actually ranked #1 in two specific categories: Enjoyment and Gameplay. The 21 people that played and rated their game absolutely loved it.

Now what?

Going forward, we will add accessibility features as a goal for all future projects. Whether or not we would try to create games that appeal to a wider audience will always be on a case-by-case basis. Sometimes the creative juices just don't flow with the current of the mainstream.

We will be revisiting Trouble With Tetras to fix some more bugs, add accessibility features and hopefully get a proper tutorial over the next few weeks. Additionally, I'm hoping to create an enhanced downloadable version of the game, with some added features and variations in play.