Gayo's Judgements

My scoring system works as follows:

The Big Two:

INTERACTIVITY (0-40): Is this a game, or a story where you walk around a lot? How much control does the player have over his character's actions? Is there a meaningful ability to influence the game world, or at least the illusion thereof? Because of the nature of this competition, battle systems don't count toward interactivity, though traditional "field puzzles" do. Any sort of nonlinearity also contributes to this rating.

0: No interaction at all; completely linear with no option for meaningful user input.
10: There's something like a game here, but it's very mechanical, with no meaningful choices or actual challenge.
20: Still mostly linear, but it's a real game. This is about what I'd expect from an actual game where the town affairs are a sidequest or distraction.
30: Some meaningful nonlinearity and quite a bit of interactivity requiring thought and skill. An entire game at this level of interactivity would be feasible.
40: Shenmue-level insanity. Multiple endings, branching plot trees, puzzles that are challenging and require real thought.

ATMOSPHERE (0-40): Does the game have character? Is it consistent in its theme and presentation? Is it engaging, appealing, or funny? This can be considered the complement of the interactivity category -- to the extent that the game is an artistic work, how good is it? Because of the thrust of this compo, the Atmosphere rating focuses on the way the town and inhabitants are presented. Fun is important here -- if the atmosphere exists but is dreary, it had better be really compelling.

0: Totally mechanical; adheres to the "town game" rule in the flimsiest possible way, with no real theme, plot, or style.
10: There's something going on, but it's not especially compelling or entertaining.
20: Solid. It's not wildly entertaining, but you can have a pretty good time with it, and there's a clear thematic consistency in the design and presentation.
30: The game is a lot of fun, it's interesting, and it has a distinct "feel" to it. It's easy to believe that the town is a real town.
40: The game is so fun and involving that you die of dehydration in a Korean internet cafe.

Contributing Factors:

INTEGRITY (0-10): Is the game reasonably complete and self-contained? Does the story have a beginning and an end? This was going to be the "plot" category, but a lot of these games don't have plots per se, so a sense of overarching wholeness will suffice. Some of these entries are small parts of larger games, but I'm of the opinion that for a compo like this a demo should still cover a distinct task or story arc.

CODE (0-5): Does the game work? I'm not looking at the innards of the code because that's a pain, so this is really just a "visible bugs" category. I also count layering errors and the like in this category.

WHIMSY (0-5): Did the game tickle my fancy personally? Was there an appealing je ne sais quois or something not clearly defined within the bounds of the compo that made it awesome? Was I bribed?



SPOILERS

For those who don't like reading, my rankings are as follows:

1: Overunderworld (70)
2: Lexico (69)
3: Junction 5 (64)
4: TORiJ's Game (27)
5: TPO's Game (18)
6: Polarity K (14)

Overall, this compo produced some nice work, but it seems like half of you had decided what you were going to make before you actually knew what the theme was. I would be OK with this if more people actually finished their games, but what do you want to bet we'll never see another release for any of these? Oh well. Onward!


OVERUNDERWORLD

INTERACTIVITY: 25
Overunderworld is exactly what this compo was designed to produce -- a game set in a town where you run around trading items with people in the hopes of eventually making everyone happy, a la Legend of Zelda. There isn't really any challenge to speak of, however -- this sort of puzzle is largely reducible to talking to people in the right order, and the fact that one person gives you half of the stuff you need for no reason breaks the thread of play. There is a minigame, but it's a twitch affair; beyond that it's mostly a matter of giving X thing to Y person. Still, as I said, that's pretty much what was expected for this compo, so while there's nothing exceptional on show here, it certainly suffices.
Some props are in order for the multiple endings, but while they're better than nothing, ultimately this game is completely linear. The only thing that matters is which way you divide the Spirit Tokens you get, which is something totally separate from the main game, and all the endings are equally nonsensical, so there's no real feeling that your decisions matter.

ATMOSPHERE: 33
Despite the lack of challenge and gameplay, this game was pretty fun to play. The characters are all retarded, but they all have distinct personalities (or at least distinct mental disabilities) and they're fun to talk to. Checking out all the nooks and crannes of the town (there were 2 nooks and 4 crannies) was entertaining. Despite there not being any houses for people to live in it feels like a town. There's a lot of humour, and while it's all kind of tepid, it contributes a lot to the ambiance.

INTEGRITY: 4
This part, not so good. The problem with Overunderworld is that it has a middle, but no beginning or end. The little introductory speech about how the town is an afterlife for morally upright athiests is so utterly ignored and unexplored that the game would actually make more sense if you replaced it with "I am an explorer who has stumbled upon a random town." The endings, as I said before, are all totally random and detached from the main plot. Still, the middle part of the game holds together well enough that it's not a total wash.

CODE: 5
No real complaints. I don't like how you can often end up satisfying people's needs without having ever heard their problems in the first place, but that's more a poor implementation than an error. By the way, I really like this game's UI, such as it is. The message boxes are super nice.

WHIMSY: 3
I had a lot of fun with this, and if not for the bad taste the beginning and end left in my mouth it would warrant a 5 in Whimsy. It feels like this game had a lot of unrealized potential, but what's here is entirely enjoyable.

FINAL SCORE: 70
GAYO'S RANKING: 1st


JUNCTION 5

INTERACTIVITY: 32
This one took my by surprise. Initially, almost all the doors yield no result, not even a "can't go this way", half the people can't be spoken to and the other half tell you to fuck off. The entire thing has a very unfinished look, and I still think that part could use some fleshing out. But! The game makes up for this later on; eventually you'll get to talk to many of those people and enter all those rooms. Although relatively linear, it diverges into three separate task arcs that meet again at the end. What I especially like about these different plot arcs is that they involve the same areas and people in different ways. That's efficient use of gamespace, but it also adds some appealing depth.
Junction 5 branches out a bit from the traditional "get something from person A and give it to person B" puzzles, including switch puzzles, block puzzles, and that thing everyone hates where you have to avoid the guards. It definitely has the most varied selection of challenges of the entries, and that speaks well for it. I'm glad the sliding panel puzzle was easy, because I never got the hang of those damn things.

ATMOSPHERE: 17
Junction 5 feels like it's just going through the motions. It's a low-key science fiction story filled with seedy characters, but nothing has any depth and it's impossible to care about anything that's happening. Now, this is true about Overunderworld too, but Overunderworld has more appeal. There's something of a catch here -- if you try for funny and light and don't succeed that well you'll come off better than if you try for serious with the same results. Also, offbeat meh is more entertaining than typical meh. So that's where this is coming from.
However! There are some good points. A couple of the characters stand out, and while the town isn't particularly interesting in and of itself, the way it's divided into sections by function appeals to me. Also, the fact that it's a space colony helps to justify how sparse and white and straight everything is. Some decorative elements wouldn't have gone amiss, though. Ultimately, the fun of this game comes from the puzzles.

INTEGRITY: 7
Like Overunderworld, Junction 5 fails to live up to its potential here -- you get 4 characters to play (I chose Avatar the Last Airbender), but the only thing your choice influences is your sprite. Again, this game has a middle but neither a beginning nor an ending -- the introductory text serves as something like a beginning, but it has nothing to do with the rest of the story, and this game doesn't even pretend to have an ending like Overunderworld does. There is a plot, though, and all the events of the game are connected in a clear way, which puts it a step above the usual "do odd jobs for townspeople" fare

CODE: 5
Again, everything seemed fine here. Having all those entities say nothing when spoken to was a bit of laziness, but there weren't any actual bugs to speak of.

WHIMSY: 3
On the whole, this game didn't set me alight. However, it had a lot of traditional RPG puzzles that, while annoying in real RPGs, still have nostalgic novelty in VERGE games.

FINAL SCORE: 64
GAYO'S RANKING: 3rd


LEXICO

INTERACTIVITY: 30
I'm sort of conflicted here. Lexico flouts the compo's rules with more blatancy but also more finesse than any other game submitted. Like Polarity K (which I'll get to next), it's clear that the team just made something they felt like doing anyway that kinda sorta fit the compo theme. However, it's really good -- I would go so far as to say that this is the best overall game of the competition, and one of the best VERGE games ever made.
All this puts us in a somewhat awkward position. Lexico is only nominally a "town game;" does its borderline gameplay fall within the "switches, levers, and whatnot" clause or not? Not only the game's rating but potentially the entire compo rests on this judgment, since Lexico's heart is in its interesting gameplay and if we can't count that in the judging there's suddenly very little left.
As you can guess from the above score, we decided in the end that while Lexico's misconduct earned it a yellow card, its puzzles and central translation mechanic was within the judgeable elements. So let me talk about them a bit! This game is entirely linear and has little meaningful interaction with townspeople, but it's by far the most challenging and thought-provoking entry we received, and is at least partly responsible for the lateness of these judgments. This is a brilliant basis for a game, and I would actually pay to see this mechanic expanded into a full game. Like, real money. I mean, it's Canadian money, but you can buy stuff with it.

ATMOSPHERE: 25
Lexico has a nice moody feel that comes from a confluence of music, gameplay, graphical style, and NPCs. However, while its environment is more varied than Junction 5's, it runs into the same "space stations are inherently boring" problem. The game is fun and because so many of the puzzles involve playing with computer UIs -- something not far removed from the player's own experience -- it's more involving than a game whose central mechanic is more abstract. However, this is a town compo, and the Atmosphere category has to take into consideration the quality of your town. Lexico really falls down here. You could certainly take an abandoned mining station and make it feel like a real settlement, but here all we get is a dungeon with some random people strewn through its corridors. Aside from the people themselves, there's nothing to indicate that people actually live here. While a few of the people are appealing, many of them have a single flat line that they repeat for the entire game, and about half of those lines are just hints. Lexico does "serious" better than anything else on display here, but while it avoids being trite it could use some seasoning.
+1 for implied Cybermen.

INTEGRITY: 6
I only beat this game at all because of the length of time the judging took -- I had previously planned to assume that the ending was OK but not stellar, and that's pretty much how it turned out. Amusingly, it's still by far the best ending of the games whose endings I could actually reach.
Lexico is from start to finish an "escape the dungeon" quest, and while it doesn't have much in the way of actual story events, what little plot transpires is interesting.

CODE: 3
It's a little buggy. There are problems with getting in and out of certain menus, and there's this one weird bug where you end up controlling a random NPC while spying on people with the camera -- again, due to weirdness in entering and exiting the character-definition menus. Also, the lack of a key-repeat feature or any sort of special characters is really painful. Oh, and despite the fact that the NPCs don't move, there's STILL a layering bug involving one of them. See, that's what you get for using oversized chrs.

WHIMSY: 5
If this isn't my favourite VERGE game ever, it's in the top three. The setting has nothing new or interesting to offer, but the central mechanic is so awesome. Can you imagine if there were a sequel to this, but longer and with huge amounts of text and a real language containing words and grammar and stuff? You can't, because it's too incredible.

FINAL SCORE: 69
GAYO'S RANKING: 2nd


POLARITY K

INTERACTIVITY: 4
Oof. Polarity K is neat. It's a cross between Dark Cloud and Ikaruga, I mean, there's no way not to like that. However. It really doesn't belong in this compo. There's no meanoingful town interaction; half the NPCs don't even have lines yet. There are no fetch quests or puzzles in the town. What little Interactivity score the game got comes from the building-placement system, which is neat but has no real effect on play. Obviously the score would have been much better if the battle system were eligible for judging, but them's the breaks.
The other problem with Polarity K as a "town game" is that the system creates a nearly impenetrable barrier against actually exploring the town. Initially, there's nothing there, and you have to go out and kill enemies to get orbs to rebuild things. However, each time you die, your orbs are halved, and there are only a finite number of them in the game, so unless you're really good you'll end up losing tons of orbs and won't be able to rebuild much anyway. This is one thing a save system would have helped with.

ATMOSPHERE: 3
The town lacks any real character, in large part because most of the characters do nothing. No matter how you put the houses down the area is going to be a bland warehouse full of buildings, and since all you can do there is talk to a couple boring people and upgrade your stats, the town is actually the least fun part of the game.
I did give the game a +1 Atmosphere bonus for using the term "pole-being." How'd you like to see my pole-being, baby?

INTEGRITY: 4
I had to cheat to rebuild most of thw town, and even after that I couldn't beat this game because it flipped out when I got to this one area that had no name. So if this game has an awesome ending that brings it all together, I didn't see it. Given the dearth of plot in the part I did play I'm guessing it didn't. That said, there is a clear task that unites the game: rebuilding the town. In that sense the game does a fairly good job of staying on target.

CODE: 1
There are two major bugs on display here: opening the menu crashes the game, and eventually it you get to this level that does nothing and sticks you off in the corner of the screen where you can't move. The former was fixed eventually, but many days after the deadline, so I'm not sure it really applies, and I'm not sure what's going on with the latter. Also, the text spills out of the menu boxes in a couple places.

WHIMSY: 2
Here we go again: this game has tons of potential, largely unrealized. At the moment it's a hard game to love, but you really want to love it, because it could be so cool. I wasn't that into it, but I'd be very interested in a refined, post-compo version.

FINAL SCORE: 14
GAYO'S RANKING: 6th


TEAM ONLY RELEASED IN JAPAN'S GAME

INTERACTIVITY: 7
This was moving in the right direction, but it didn't get very far. For whatever reason Ness decided not to take advantage of the extension, so we're left with something one-third finished. That said, it is a game about running around and doing things for random townspeople, and that should count for something since half the entrants ignored the spirit of the compo.
If there were an entire game's worth -- even a compo game's worth -- of what's on display here it'd get a passable interactivity score, something in the 15-25 range. It's completely linear, but it's a little bit cute and it gives you enough to keep you busy, if not actually make you think. Unfortunately, the game only gets you through two stages of fetch quest before stopping abruptly. This looks like a bug, but if you fix it you can see that nothing more was finished.

ATMOSPHERE: 14
As I said before, bland, stereotypical characters are much easier to forgive when the game isn't trying to be serious. Few of the NPCs have distinctive personalities, but it's still mildly entertaining to talk to them. I could see this being fun, I really could. Of course, the lack of any real goal is a sticking point -- this falls back on the old "help people because they need help" style of fetch quest. Is that an homage to old NES RPGs? It's hard to tell.
I love that Ness used NES-style graphics for this -- I thought that was a cute touch, and with so many VERGE games shooting for fancy graphics (and failing), it's nice to see one deliberately using extremely basic sprites and tiles. Also, I love the random clip-art sounds that trigger as you walk around.

INTEGRITY: 1
No climax, no point, no meaning.

CODE: 0
Multiple gamebreaking bugs indicate that not even the most rudimentary playtesting was done. Of course, if you view this as a "fix the broken game" game, its interactivity rating goes up quite a bit.

WHIMSY: 2
These two points are entirely for the things I said I liked in the second paragraph of the Atmosphere section. Stroking my nostalgia nerve is worth at least a point, and in general it's cute even if it isn't fun.

FINAL SCORE: 27
GAYO'S RANKING: 4th


TEAM PANTS OPTIONAL'S GAME

INTERACTIVITY: 0
So, yeah. Where to begin. You know how it is with compos: everything goes wrong and your cool idea crashes on the runway, but you put work in it so dammit you intend to show it to people no matter how lame it is? Yeah.
This game, which despite the name was done by Overkill alone, is only a "game" in the loosest sense. It actually does have a battle system, but it's not being rated on that and it doesn't have any effect on the game anyway. This is really just a very bland sandbox where you wander around until you look at the right thing, at which point the game ends. It's too bad, too: if they'd had a prompt asking "Do you want to win or lose?" I could at least have given them a couple points.
As the last judgment I'm delivering, this is the ideal place to leave a cautionary warning that applies to this game especially but to several of the others in lesser degrees. Heed well this lesson, children of VERGE: if you don't plan to continue working on your game after the compo deadline (and let's face it, you don't), don't waste all your time on things totally irrelevant to the actual contest. Nobody cares about your battles and lighting system and original art when all you're being rated on is fun town interaction!

ATMOSPHERE: 10
Nothing like a plot, but you can go into houses and talk to people, They all just joke about how much the game sucks, but it's at least kind of funny, and from the outside the town does seem like a town. Also, although some NPCs repeat the same text, every NPC says something, which can't be said for every game in this competition. It might have gotten a slightly higher rating if the humour were directed at townishness rather than general self-mockery, but I like self-mockery. Games that know they suck and seem vaguely sheepish about it are kind of endearing.

INTEGRITY: 0
There's no plot and nothing happens. It's kind of zen..

CODE: 5
Well, it works.

WHIMSY: 3
This is yet another game that shows a lot of promise but will never be touched again now that the compo is over. I like the western atmosphere, and there were supposed to be zombies or something. Let us shed a tear for what might have been.

FINAL SCORE: 18
GAYO'S RANKING: 5th

Grue's rating schema:

I will be giving base scores based on the following three categories!

50 points - Puzzles/Quests!
40 points - Fun!
10 points - How much did I feel like I was being pandered to?

Then I'll be incrementing and decrementing based on specific things I liked or didn't like. Hooray!

Yes, this is my stupidest schema yet. At least I did it in base 10. And just because I'm awarding 10 points for potentially sucking up to me doesn't mean I'll necessarily award them next compo!

Also, I must apologize for the delay on this compo. It's all my doing and I'm a very bad man... but at least I didn't judge in base-30. :(

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Junction 5 : 81 points
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Puzzles/Quests: 50pts.
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Ah, while slow to pick up, J5 had it all! Fetch quests, box puzzles, and even a largish (and required) minigame that made me want to kill things in frustration! Definitely the widest difference in activities of any game presented in this competition, and as such is worthy of note.

Fun: 25pts.
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A bit light on things I actually enjoyed. With NPC-interaction puzzles a lot of the fun comes from the pacing and spacing of discoveries, and I found the general placement to be too spread out. Combine that with a large amount of NPCs that were the "bad" kind of filler (ie, didn't even say 'flavor text', just plain didn't react at all.), and quickly the game became a less fun for it. For comparison, this scored lower points than Lexico because the more grindy parts in Lexico still kept my attention due to fascination, and there was never much a sense of frustration in OverUnder.

Pandering to Grue: 7 Pts.
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Although I'm a bit of a space nut, I never really got the feeling that j5's team was trying to suck up to me, McGrue the judge, on a personal level. Partial marks.

Extra bonus modifiers of love and hate: -1 total
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-1 point (winners use 320x240)
-1 point no sound effects
+1 point there was sound after I reversed my microphone and headphone jacks >_>
+1 point recycling sully code for the win!
-1 point no run button (~ doesn't count)
+1 point "OUTAR SPACE!"
-1 no save augh
-1 Thou shalt not suffer npcs you cannot talk to.


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Lexico
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Puzzles/Quests: 50pts.
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While not what I initially had in mind when I formulated this competition's rules, and although it took me a while of pondering about it, I finally came to the conclusion that it was a great puzzle game, and one of the best, most complete verge games I'd ever met. The entire goddamn thing is a puzzle, too. And a thinky puzzle.

Fun: 35 pts.
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It'd've been more fun for me if I hadn't been so frustrated during this ordeal. I didn't have the day or so of fresh-brained manhours to dedicate to the solving of such a game. This is a game to have tons of papers spread all around me with glyphs and translations scrawled in sentence fragments all about, so that if an outsider happened upon my notes, they'd think I was a Lovecraftian Archaeologist with a penchant for doodling crude penises in the borders. However, after a bit I discovered the convenient note-making functionality and that visceral pleasure was denied (oh, sure, I could've done it anyways, but it'd've been a damned lie). Furthermore, it's not really a game to jump in and out of, but rather to play constantly.

I have not yet finished it. It's been weeks. Yet every time I reopen it, I want to make more headway. I *need* to. If that's not fun, I dunno what is anymore.

Years later, I'll walk out of a methadone clinic rueing that same line of reasoning applied to other matters.

Pandering to me: 10pts.
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Although probably not directed completely at me, or even partially, or in fact at all (which really was included in the previous clause ot this sentence but things always sound better in threes and so I took poetic licence to... oh, where was I?)

Anyways, as I was saying, I'm an adventure gamer from way back. My name has a zork reference in it. If anyone likes tedious puzzle-solving, it's me. Yay me!

Extra bonus modifiers of love and hate: +4 total
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+1 320 x 240 yay!
+1 save yay!
+1 okay, it was pretty.
-1 AUUUUUUUURRRGH AUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGH
+1 The music reminded me of Anachronox. Daww.
-1 For making the alien numbers base-0, unintuitive for humans.
+1 For making the alien numbers base-0, intuitive for aliens (programmers).


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Ness's game of wonderment: 10 total.
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Puzzles/Quests: 3pts.
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Seriously, Ness. There was like one "quest" and it wasn't even properly implemented. You cocktease :(

Fun: 6pts.
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I... liked... the cow? :3

Seriously, though, the ambient sound effects and reactive sound effects were classy. A lot of RPG fun comes from awesome use of sound. I just wish there was more game to accompany it :3

Pandering to me: 1pts.
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I did not feel any special connection and/or gameplay bribery. Past the cows, that is. MOOOO.

Extra bonus modifiers of love and hate: +0 total
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Ness
+1 320x240
+1 MOOOOOO
-1 really, though, wtf?
+1 "How pedestrian!"
-1 Thou shalt not suffer npcs you cannot talk to.
-1 I got the lunch, but the hungry guard didn't seem to care. :(

====================================
Overunderworld: 93 total.
====================================

Puzzles/Quests: 45pts.
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Okay, it had more quests than puzzles. Okay, really, it had no puzzles. But it was all quest. Ror.

Fun: 35pts.
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It was the most like what I had in mind for this contest. A little on the repetitive fetch questy side, but it had suggestive dialogue and a minigame that wasn't entirely annoying!

...of course it made no sense in the end. But you should get used to that, kids... it's just like life!

Pandering to me: 10pts.
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* Lewd puns and lewd humor? Check.
* Lesbian love triangle? Check.
* Clams and carrots, and confusion over whether clams give you pearls? Check.

Full marks.

Extra bonus modifiers of love and hate: +3 total
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+1 320x240!!12
+1 Good choice of stolen arts! (I've been on a shining force and zelda kick lately...)
+1 "Tobin, Spirit Guide!"
-1 Unreadable books. MORE FORGIVABLE THAN NPCS BUT STILL UNFORGIVABLE.
+1 Goatse atop the orphanage and circe's place!!!
+1 Yay saves!
-1 hollow feeling at end. aw.

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The other guys: 0pts
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Okay, I didn't judge the completely incomplete entries. What was there to judge? It was a puzzle compo! At least ness had a single-flag to toggle, right? :(

Yeah, I suck. For many reasons.

For those not up at this late hour, Gayo was talking about the empty stubs that were up before being filled with crap. Er, I mean judgements.

For a while there was a bug where I screwed up and put an extra 0 on the diameter of one of the cow sounds, so no matter where you were it would moo. Yeah.

Also, talk the the guard a few times! Or mabey I just suck and broke the script. The world may never know!

I'm prepared to give zero points, but I have to save it for the time when it is most needed. If I give zero points to anything less than the worst game ever I will be powerless when I finally encounter that game. Zero points is the forbidden technique I can only use on a worthy opponent.

I didn't consider that eligible for judging. It was pretty cool, though.

Sucks that team pants optional crashed since I had made some cute art for it. Oh well next compo, but why do all the projects I join die! ;_;