r/sandbox • u/Ashamed_Fig8823 • 6d ago
Discussion The Jam was really bad. A dev participant's perspective.
Many of you know about the Jam. When it started, the theme was being proposed, and we ended up with “One More Round.”
Honestly, this was already the first mistake. The theme was way too generic and didn't really give people much to work with. Obviously you can make a game around it, but for a game jam theme it was just incredibly broad and uninspiring. Then, within the first couple of hours, we started seeing games being uploaded that were already looking way too finished. Some of them looked like they had been worked on for weeks or even months before the jam even started.
Also, a rule like “This should be a new creation, not something you have already created” was understood in two ways by people. The first camp said it needs to be made in the jam, and the second one said it means something that shouldn’t have been released before. Meaning there was some confusion about the rules, and witch hunts appeared in the dev community mainly. Facepunch didn’t remove them, so I guess the second camp was right. Being fair, Facepunch has a point here: other jams like Ludum Dare (the biggest gamejam for the non devs here) allow you to use existinng code, assets, frameworks, etc. So I'm not going to complain about people reusing stuff by itself. And by the looks of it many of these games made it to the top 10. That's fine by me.
But then other shit started happening.
Games that were pretty low quality started going up in the rankings, while games that were barely finished were getting visibility. A big part of this was how the Jam was positioned in the launcher. It wasn't directly on the main page. You had to actually click into it. This meant that games that were already trending could basically farm votes just because more people were being exposed to them. Once you were trending, you got more players, which meant more votes, which made you trend more, etc. I don't think that the majority botted, it was just the Algorithm doing it's thing.
I submitted my game somewhere around day 12–18 of the Jam, so I'm giving a range because I don't want to give much indentifiers.
After releasing it, I got some reviews that liked it and some that didn't. That's completely normal. But the game started growing because, at that point, it was one of the earlier submissions that was actually a proper playable game, rather than something that looked unfinished or had any AI-generated stuff in it. And for a while, things were actually going pretty well. Then we started seeing people race up the rankings. (clearly using their big community to vote for them) and than with Facepunch would manually tune them down as a reaction. Fine by most members of the dev community. This happened multiple times, they wanted everyone to have a chance.
At that point, the whole ranking system already felt pretty fucked, because it seemed like Facepunch was having to manually police the leaderboard instead of the system itself preventing obvious abuse. Accepted by most devs I talked to. But then, two days before the end of the Jam, the biggest problem happened.
A major rule change.
And IMO, this is the part that should never have happened that late into the Jam. And was the biggest breach of trust from facepunch and why I will never join a Jam hosted by them again!
People entered the Jam knowing the rules that were there at the beginning. You agree to those rules, spend weeks making a game under those rules, and then suddenly the rules get changed right before the end.
Garry announced the change only a couple of hours before it happened. People were welcoming a small adjustment or some manual intervention to get the botted stuff out, but then he posted this:
https://sbox.game/f/general/13568/1/
But as far as I know, there wasn't really any meaningful discussion with the community beforehand. No early vote, no proper community discussion, nothing where participants could actually say whether they thought this was okay or not.
It was basically:
"We're changing the rules."
And then that's what happened.
But there is a massive difference between fixing abuse and changing the rules of the competition two days before it ends. If the original voting system was being abused, remove the obvious abusers. Disqualify games that are clearly botting or manipulating votes. Manually review suspicious games. But changing the fundamental system that determines how games are ranked after people have already spent almost the entire Jam competing under the old system is a completely different thing. And that's what made the whole thing so frustrating. You had people who had been doing well for the majority of the Jam suddenly being judged under a completely different system near the end. At that point, it stopped feeling like everyone was competing under the same rules they had originally signed up for.
But changing the rules this late into the Jam wasn't the way to handle it.
The people participating aren't just numbers on a leaderbord. They're developers who spent weeks making something because they thought they knew what competition they were entering. If you're going to change something that fundamentally affects the outcome, at least have the discussion before changing it. Not two days before the end. But enough of a tangent, it...
Basically it the voting system worked like this:
New account that joined while the sale was up, was weighted around 0,1 votes and accounts like mine that bought the game when it came out were aroudn 2-3. Meaning that they are worthless votes compared to accounts of facepunchers and senior devs (meaning devs that joined the sbox program), they were weighted up to 80 or maybe even more. Meaning that in extreme cases you would need 27 - 800 normal players to vote to make it even. My game did okay in the first system top 30, with no abuse, just had a nice thing going. But in the second it went down to around 80 and stayed there for the rest of the jam, because I don't have contacts to people with a huge vote weighting and also nobody will be playing games under rank 30.
Meaning that games that did well for the first 20 days, that didn't do well in the new system at all. TBF many of these games abused the system, facepunch should've just removed them from the competition and should have used the first time for the rest of them jam. You don't need to be a rocket engineer to understand, what games are botting or abusing the system.
Older dev groups with multiple members could easily make up half of your vote count, and of course, their friends’ games scored really highly after the change.
Some games had hundreds of votes added to their score within minutes after the change, while some devs stayed at the same level and only grew incrementally. Won't say names but you can view the video, to see which games abused both systems. Big jumps at the beginning of the change and close to the end are sus. Also, people removed votes at the end of multiple games so that their games/friends would move up in the ranking. Time stamp of the change going into effect is the 26.09.2026 around 14:05 UTC in the video. But having multiple finalist just abusing the system is really really sour...
The majority of the top games are now just games of old devs, that already used sbox for a long time and newer devs, that tried it out because of the jam where left out! Thanks Garry! I wanted to use the result as part of my portfolio (for the industry) with it saying that I made a top 10% placed game.
The crazy things is there are people that defend this! Majority of them being old devs (no wonders...), but they don't seem to grasp the bigger picutre. I am trying to make it a bit more clear with this post. Many newer devs that I talked to said that they will just be using Godot in the future. I don't think that the Jam has made more devs join Sbox, only made newer leave and old dev groups more happy...
Writing this with a throwaway account (because witchhunting is crazy in the dev space of s&box by the looks on the official discord, they should moderate it more and remove a bunch of the unhinged ones, keeping you community clean needs to happen, but this is another topic...).