It has now been a month since the jam, time to review the results and lessons learned.

First things, first. I didn't win. Shocker I know. All jokes aside, I'm not going to lie, that I was a bit gutted by the results. I knew from the start, that I won't be high up, but I ended up very close to last, which did hurt a bit. To be fair, the competition was fierce and there were a lot of good entries in it.

Results

Let's talk about the results first and maybe also a bit about the overall procedure.

Methodology

The voting started on October 6th and, if I remember correctly, lasted until October 9th. So there were about 3-4 days of voting (considering some time zone shenannigans and so forth). Only people that actually participated in the jam (and I think, that submitted a game) were able to vote.

I think this was a good thing, considering some creators had a way bigger following than most others. So would it have been open to the public, the results would have been way to skewed towards the big creators.

In total there were 118 entries submitted. Considering that large amount of entries, the few days that were left for voting, didn't feel enough. My hope is, that maybe for future jams, there's a longer voting period.

There were 3 criteria that you could vote on, with a rating from 1 to 5 stars (1 being the worst): Fun, Usability and Writing.

My Results

I ended up on 110th place. Which is kind of top ten from below. As I said, I was a bit disappointed. I hoped to be at least in the 90's. I got some nice feedback early on, that made me hopeful. My ratings ended up like this.

itch.io does adjust your scores according to the number of votes you got. This avoids, that if a game only receives 1 vote, with all 5 stars, that it would win. In practice this means, that your score gets adjusted downwards if you receive less votes than the median. I only got 14 from 16 ratings, so that is why my scores are worse than the Raw Score.

This is where I think the short voting time hurt the most. Many top games had like 30-40 votes. So there's some consideration of visuals, that lead people to reading your game. This can be seen a bit from the downloads chart.

There are two spikes: One when I published my entry (29th of September). At that point there were maybe only 20 entries published yet. So people were finding my game easily, downloaded it and had a look at it. Later when the voting started, the amount of downloads weren't that high anymore.

Since I received less votes than there were downloads, most of these were probably from people outside the jam, that weren't able to vote.

All in all, I ended somewhere on an average of 2.5, so kind of in the middle. If I look at the distribution of the ratings, that is reflected there as well.

Learnings

Key point for me is of course to learn something. This was my first jam and also the first time I published an adventure. In a system and style I'm not yet fully accustomed. Having finished something is already an achievement and it wasn't all that bad. Some people liked it and would incorporate the adventure in their hexcrawl. This is already a good sign.

Layout

One thing I struggled the most, was to create a good layout. I used Scribus a free-software DTP. For what I needed to do, it worked. But I could feel some of the shortcomings. One such thing was tables. This is a feature that is non-existent. So I ended up "brute-forcing" it and just creating text-boxes that I moved around so that it looked like a table.

Apart from learning the tools, I also struggled a bit with how to actually presenting the stuff. I think I ended up with a way to big font, and using two columns with this big of a font was a mistake as well. It was still readable but lead to some funny line break and alignment issues.

There are two problems in this example. It is not really clear where the text continues. Is it "and overwhelming feeling" or is it "and treacherous". There's a clear missing distinction between the two columns.

The other thing is, that the spaces between words are irregular. They get squished or elongated, because I choose to justify the text into a block. Having small columns, will lead to this kind of issues.

I've refactored the layout since then. It should be now much more clearer and it should be now easier to follow the flow of the text. I'm not a hundred percent convinced of the new layout but I think it is a step forward.

I'm also no longer using Scribus and I'm currently trying out Affinity Publisher instead. It is no longer free, but you can try it for 6 months for free and the workflow was a bit easier for me. So maybe I will stick to it in the future.

As the keen eyed might have seen, my initial plan to fit everything on a pamphlet did go unfulfilled. In the end, I think that was not a bad thing. So I ended up, creating more of a zine kind of thing.

Writing

The adventure presents itself as a small hexcrawl. This is I think a point that came across well. Knave (and to some extend all OSR-style games) tend to do well, with some sort of exploration. I wanted to have every hex to be "meaningful". That means there should be something to explore on each of these locations. You should get rewarded from exploring. I hate it in videogames, when you follow all the paths presented, but on 90% of them, there's nothing.

This is maybe kind of different to what you can find on the Internet when it comes to hexcrawls. Most often there are some landmarks sprinkled in, into an otherwise empty map. Yes, there are random encounters to be had, but depending on the ruleset you are using, most of the time, there's nothing happening - except your resources are getting used.

All the locations also fit together somehow. They are linked with each other, and they tell a story. Which one, depends on how the players are going to explore and what the GM wants to do with it.

These are the things I got positive feedback from other contributors on. It can fit into existing hexcrawls. The overall plan was to have these kind of small hexcrawls and if you take a bunch of them you can create a bigger hexcrawl. And I think my recipe to create these seems to work. I was able to create one in about 1-2 weeks (Art and Layout not counted in). I have some more ideas, so I can refine it a bit more.

Is it enough for a competition, though?

The answer, obviously, is no. I think for a competition you might need to have a bit more of a "gimmick". And there were several cool entries: A timeloop in a haunted mansion or proceduraly generated dungeons. These tended to fare a bit better than the rest. There's also classical hexcrawls similar to mine, but with more weirdness attached to it.

I've created just a "standard" quest with a dungeon attached, that ends in killing the BBEG. It does its job, and I don't think it's that bad. But just not enough for a competition that seeks for the special. Especially with so many authors that may have seen my idea done to death (and probably also better). It's just not that exciting.

I have some ideas to change the ending a bit, and some small stuff. But overall I won't be making any big changes to it. I also feel that maybe I don't deliver fully on the premise. It's a fine adventure for what it is and at some point I have to move on and take it as the lesson it is.

What it is lacking though mostly is some sort of loot that you can get out of it (my initial goal was, that it brings you from level 1 to level 2). There's currently no incentive to do the whole thing. Maybe you can sell the gem, but that's about it.

Final Thoughts

One goal of the competition was also to provide some premade adventures to the Knave community. There were no modules, so when you wanted to pick up the game you had to made your own, which of course is a bit of a downside. Especially when you are new to old-school systems (or maybe TTRPGs in general).

I'm proud to be a part of that initial group. Maybe down the line, my little adventure is chosen to be that part of an initial impression in a gaming group that then takes up the game and roleplaying in general.

Would I compete again?

Maybe.

I definitely want to write some more adventures and publish them - now that I have some sort of pipeline and layout to do so. I might need more time than I thought I would and do some playtesting (which in this timeframe just wasn't doable for me).

So, stay tuned.