I can already see that a number of developers are unhappy with the nomination system, particularly with the fact that entries could be published from the very beginning of the Build stage and immediately start collecting nominations — nominations that directly affect which games reach the finals.
I mostly agree with that criticism. I watched the leaderboard throughout the jam, and a large part of it had already formed within roughly the first 10 days. Since then, many of the same projects have remained near the top. With only a couple of days left, it seems unlikely that this situation is going to change significantly.
But there is another question I think is worth asking:
What was the point of having a jam theme at all?
A very large number of entries — at least among the ones I had time to play — barely do anything with the theme "One More Round".
In some cases, "more" or "round" seems to exist mostly in the title. In others, the connection to the theme is extremely weak and amounts to little more than the game being endlessly repeatable.
There are plenty of good games in the jam. That is not the issue.
The issue is that if you showed many of these games to somebody without telling them they were made for Game Jam III, I doubt they would ever guess that all of them were supposed to be built around the same theme.
Compare that with other large game jams. Brackeys Game Jam is a convenient recent example. Look at its notable or finalist projects and you can usually see how the developers interpreted the theme. The theme becomes an important part of the game's mechanic, structure, presentation, joke, or central idea.
That is one of the things that makes game jams interesting in the first place.
Here, however, we have an RTS that could seemingly exist exactly as it does without the jam, something very close to a Megabonk-style game, a bullet hell, a thief simulator primarily built around co-op, another dungeon crawler whose strongest connection to the theme appears to be its name, and many other ordinary game concepts.
You could argue that this is partly caused by the theme itself. "One More Round" is extremely broad. With enough interpretation, almost any replayable game can be made to fit it.
But that raises another problem: where is the creativity in interpreting that constraint?
Where are the unusual ideas, clever twists, and interesting attempts to build an entire game around the theme? That kind of creativity has always been one of the defining characteristics of game jams.
And this becomes especially frustrating when looking at what happened near the end of the Build stage.
During the final day, there was a noticeable influx of genuinely polished and interesting entries. Presumably, many of those developers were doing exactly what you would normally expect people to do in a game jam: using the full development period they were given to finish, polish, test, and improve their games before publishing them.
And unless there is a very dramatic shift in nominations during the remaining time, several of those recently released, high-quality games are simply going to lose their chance at the finals to the current top five — a group of finalists that, in my opinion, is highly questionable both in terms of how strongly some of those games represent the jam theme and in terms of whether the voting system gave every entry a comparable opportunity to compete.
The problem is not that those newer games necessarily deserve to win just because they were released later.
The problem is that they are starting the actual Nomination stage at effectively zero nominations, while some of the current leaders entered it with 80–90 votes already accumulated during the Build stage.
That is an enormous difference.
Realistically, a newly released entry now has to convince dozens of people to nominate it just to reach the starting position that some other games had before the Nomination stage officially began.
And a sudden surge large enough to overcome that difference seems very unlikely. A significant part of the active audience has probably already played games and used its nominations during the previous weeks.
This is especially significant for s&box, where the active audience around the jam does not appear dramatically larger than the number of entries themselves — roughly a few hundred people.
So the system effectively creates a strange incentive:
Developers who release an unfinished game early get weeks to accumulate visibility and nominations.
Developers who use the full Build period to finish and polish their game are placed at an enormous disadvantage when the actual Nomination stage begins.
That seems backwards for a game jam.
And the result is not merely theoretical. We can now see polished entries appearing near the deadline that are extremely unlikely to catch the existing leaders in the short nomination window, regardless of how good they are, simply because they did not spend the previous two or three weeks accumulating votes.
Meanwhile, the current top five may reach the finals carrying a large number of nominations collected before some of their competitors had even been published.
When that voting system is combined with how loosely the theme appears to matter in practice, I find the current group of likely finalists quite questionable as a representation of the best Game Jam III entries.
Maybe something will change dramatically during the remaining nomination period. I hope it does.
But if the situation remains roughly as it is now, I find it very difficult to call this a well-designed or well-run game jam.
