Ok, as I promised, here is the official write-up for judges:
The competition will run for one month. Though you certainly may, and are encouraged, to play the games while the competition is running, you will only need to play these games during the week after the competition is finished. This week will be the judging round of the competition. Also, if you choose to play games during the process of the competition, keep in mind that these are a work-in-progress and you should reserve all judgement until after the contest has come to a close.
While I believe it is an outstanding benefit to interested developers to provide feedback on their games, it is not required. Indeed, I will not reveal any of the judges' identities under any circumstances. If they so desire, they may reveal themselves below. However, no judge feedback is allowable during the contest period as this sits squarely within the realm of cheating.
Once the contest has ended, each judge will be responsible for playing all of the available entries over a period of 1 week. At the end of that week, I will need a score sheet for each entry from each judge. This score sheet should rank the entry on four different categories: Fun Factor, Originality, User Interface / Usability, and Overall Appearance. Each category should be assigned a value from 1 to 5 with 1 representing a poor category ranking and 5 representing a high category ranking.
I will calculate the results of these reviews by performing the following:
Each judge's review will be given a final score by multiplying each category by its percentage (Fun x 50, originality x 25, interface x 15, visual x 10) and adding the results together.
After a game has had its final scores determined for each of the judges, I will total the scores together and divide that number by the total number of judges to produce a final score average. This will be the final deterministic when ranking games.
If, by some chance, multiple games receive the same final ranking, I will follow the same proceedure for those games but I will discard the lowest rating in each case. For instance, if a game's fun factor was rated by 5 separate judges as: 3, 4, 4, 5, 2; I will use only 3, 4, 4, and 5 for this second set of rankings. If multiple games still receive the same final ranking after the process, the result will be declared a tie.
*edit - minor grammar errors corrected.
