New voting system, judging, and selecting winners

Given your feedback from previous years we’re trying to improve the scoring experience and thus introducing new voting system this year, where the official results are based on YOUR votes.

With 250+ games submitted each year over the past few years it was super hard for judges to play each game carefully enough to give all of them a fair score. On the other hand, Community Awards, where you, the developers, voted for the top5 games of your chosing, was limited. You said written feedback is one of the most important things in this competition though. That’s why we’re making the following changes:

Judges become experts

Instead of judging the games to produce the official results, they will focus only on written feedback, and only to a given set of games per expert. We had situations where the best games were getting 5–6 comments from the judges while some others none at all.

To guarantee each game gets solid feedback, each expert will be assigned to a fixed list of 20–30 games he will carefully play and then write what was good and what could be improved. This way each game gets a minimum of one such feedback.

Community Awards become official results

It’s still YOU who submitted a game will decide on the places given games will end up, but now instead of Community Awards, it will be official results. You won’t be allowed to vote on your own game though, and will be able to vote for a given pair of games only once.

Selecting top5 become 1vs1 battles

Instead of trying to pick only a fraction of the games you think were the best, you will have an influence on the final results and the ranking of all the submitted games. Plus you don’t need to play all the games before you can start voting - you only need to compare two games at once.

Have more time? Pick another pair, play the games, cast your vote, and move on. The more votes you can submit the better for the ranking.

Voting application

The voting script was created by Tricsi, and is based on the Swiss Tournament rules. The voting phase will last for three weeks up until October 4th when it will be closed and the final results announced on October 5th.

Visit vote.js13kgames.com to log in via GitHub and start voting - be sure to use the same GitHub account username you submitted your game with.

WebXR the old way

You won’t find WebXR category games in the voting system because of its specific rules allowing them to use extra libraries for free. They are separate from the overall results since first time they were introduced anyway.

Instead of devs voting on the games we will utilize the judges, who have both lots of various VR devices developers don’t necessary own, and the experience of building such VR creations. They will both give games proper feedback and score them accordingly.

Help improve it

Please remember that it’s all because of your feedback, and we’re really doing our best to make this as good as possible. Send your opinions, suggest improvements, help build solutions to the issues we might face - even if it’s not perfect this time, we will try to improve it for upcoming years. Thank you!