You are not the only one who had this issue. Seems to be a small glitch. Not sure what is causing it yet though.
I’m realizing now that this is all stuff I probably should have brought up beforehand, but seeing how the categories affected the scores made me think a little harder about the current scoring system. I feel like you get an automatic advantage if you’re making and rpg or visual novel, since those game types rely heavily on writing and dialog. I’m not %100 sure what would be better, maybe rolling the visual art aspect and writing into one category with less total points? Right now writing is nearly twice as important as the actual mechanics of the game, and art is literally twice as important. It just feels kind of weird to me that with this scoring sheet just having any art and writing at all is probably better for your score than having flawless game mechanics. Honestly mechanics seems low in comparison to a lot of the categories. Innovation is way more important than the game mechanics, and even more so when you consider that game concept and innovation are basically the same category. I dunno, I’m definitely a little biased but I’d like to see more emphasis on the “game” in the next game jam.
I’m not really sure what aspect you’re looking at. I’ve included the breakdown of the scores, and the Concept/Design is worth over twice what writing and art are combined. I’m actually pretty happy with how the scoring is setup currently. If someone put a lot of effort into the art/writing, they get a leg up and I feel that that is completely fair, but an overwhelmingly good game in terms of concept/design will still win out. Our one visual novel lost out largely due to other games having more fleshed out designs.
Yes, but inside of concept/design, 700 points are for originality, 300 are for incorporating the theme (not sure how this is different from the points you get for basic requirements), 400 are for incorporating weight gain, and then 200 are for how good the mechanics are themselves. Maybe I’m just misunderstanding what you guys mean by “mechanics”. If all the other categories in concept/design apply to the mechanics, is the mechanics category just for all mechanics not directly weight/theme related? If innovation is tied to the game mechanics, do you get a 0 unless you come up with a new game mechanic? Or is innovation based on using prebuilt assets vs scratchbuilt ones? It’s also frustrating having a part of the scoring sheet that’s just “if your game doesn’t have writing in it, it’s not as good a game”. It feels a little restrictive when some games get locked out of %13 (factoring out the 20000 points you get for basic requirements) of the points because they didn’t make a writing oriented game. It’s like if there were a set of points for puzzle quality. Any game can potentially have puzzles in it, but you shouldn’t lose your points just because you didn’t put one specific kind of content in the game, unless you add writing to the list of requirements on top of weight gain and the theme.
Also on an unrelated note is it possible to add another subcategory under the art category for sound? Not music specifically, just sound in general.
Wait is the theme fat…Fortnight? Like the actual game Fortnight?
No, not Fortnite the game, Fortnight as in 2 weeks. The theme is different for each jam. See the related posts in news or the about category for that year for details on the theme.
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I just had one of the biggest sighs of relief of my entire life
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Theres no mention of music being scored. Could you get extra points if you made the ost yourself and its half decent?
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Here is a long response because i think the question deserves to be addressed in detail.
We don’t have a specific category for music. There is a few reasons for it that tie together.
When you test, or measure something you’re automatically incentivizing people to focus on it. If in a workplace you judge someone’s performance on how fast they do a task, then you will have employees doing what ever they can to do that task faster even at the expense of quality or safety.
That’s exactly what the game jam is: A way for us to incentivize the community to make more and better games. We award points for art assets because games are an extremely visual medium. We want people to practice working on art. We award points for writing because we want to push developers to make games with a deeper context than just "and then she got fat.
With regards to custom music i think there are a few big snags.
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Honestly we don’t have a lot of musicians. Having points awarded for having custom music might unfairly advantage the few people who do have the skills to make their own music. Comparatively we have a lot of artists and programmers.
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Music is so incredibly subjective. What might be subtle and evocative to one person might be blaring and overbearing to another. I think the volatility of scoring for a music category would make the score more prone to advantage people who like a particular genre.
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Ultimately we want to emphasize the weight part of Weightgaming. The combination of the two is our niche. I don’t know how to invoke a fat theme through music, and if you can i imagine it would be gimmicky and incredibly subjective (again hitting on point 2) . Please don’t get me wrong, music is an incredibly important part of media, but for this contest it’s not a primary focus.
However none of this means that you can’t get any points from custom music. There is absolutely room in the judges preference category to award points for music. Additionally i know i would also consider a game’s sound and music in the Game Concept score category and the Use of Theme score category.
Maybe in future jams we’ll include an “atmosphere” category or something else where music would play a bigger role.
Hope this answers your question to your satisfaction!
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For the most part @Juxtaterrestrial hit the reasons behind it right on the nose. There are a few other points I would like to add as well though.
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Music in general is harder to copyright check so it is harder for us to know is some one actually made the soundtrack in use.
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We try to weigh the scoring more towards the games design and concept more then any part of execution. In all honesty the only reason the art section exists at all was to incentivize devs to try to move away from the standard quest or twine text adventures that where extremely prevalent on the site.
That being said sound effects and music are a big part of games. So I agree we may want to consider adding some kind of category where games that use good sound design can get some points for it.
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In regards to item 1. I knew I forgot something =P
Just a quick question about rule General - 1; what is the [ trust level of at least 1] ?
(I’m a bit of a shy newb here, but would still like to make a game~!)
Its is kind of a trust or security system for discourse. The TL1 rule is to prevent spam accounts from entering so we require a user has at least TL1 to enter. To get this you really only have to read through the site a bit (30 posts and 10mins of read time). You can find the details here:
I took a look at your account though and you already have TL1 privileges so you are good to go! Good luck on the jam!
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Ah, excellent! Thank you very much for that 
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Where and how do I post about my game, or do I just need to tag it with something?
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Submissions must be done here: https://forum.weightgaming.com/c/fat-fortnight-submissions/fat-fortnight-11-2019
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So, just create a topic, right?
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Yep! That’s right. That’s all
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Ah, thanks dude 
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I know this forum is primarily themed around Weight Gain, but would there necessarily be a point deduction for focusing more on inflation (air and water) rather than Weight Gain in terms of eating things to get bigger?
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