The 2022 Playdate Community Awards

Community Awards 2022
Date:	December 8 2022
Time:	3PM PST
Hosts:	GantProdux Guv_Bubbs

The 2022 Playdate Community Awards is a game of the year show hosted live on the Tiny Yellow Machine Twitch channel.

The show is a swanky affair with the hosts GantProdux & Guv_Bubbs dressing up for the show.

The show has...

• 18 awards to hand out to developers
  
• Exciting game reveals
  
• Special guests popping in and presenting awards
  
• Shout outs to Community heroes

Awards

All games released before Nov 4th are eligible to win. (Season One & Community Games)

Categories

Audio
Best Soundtrack
🏅 Casual Birder 🏅 B360 🏅 Tapeworm Disco Puzzle 🏅 Demon Quest ‘85

Best Sound Design
🏅 A Joke That's Worth $0.99 🏅 Saturday Edition 🏅 Questy Chess 🏅 Echoic Memory

Visual
Artistic Visual Achievement Award in a Pulp Game
🏅 Along Came a Spider 🏅 Art 7 🏅 Castle Helios 🏅 Eyeland

Artistic Visual Achievement Award in an SDK Game
🏅 Spellcorked 🏅 Zipper 🏅 Stars of the Screen 🏅 Necrocrisis

Best Launch Experience
🏅 Crankin's Time Travel Adventure 🏅 Bloom 🏅 Sparrow Solitaire 🏅 Rocket Bytes

Genre
Best Puzzle Game
🏅 Omaze 🏅 Pick Pack Pup 🏅 Shift 🏅 Skwish

Best Action Game
🏅 Star Sled 🏅 A Balanced Brew 🏅 Inventory Hero 🏅 Crankin's Time Travel Adventure

Best Adventure Game
🏅 Eyeland 🏅 Casual Birder 🏅 Saturday Edition 🏅 Ratcheteer

Best Arcade Game
🏅 Hyper Meteor 🏅 Flipper Lifter 🏅 Whitewater Wipeout 🏅 Fish'n Feathers

Best Sim/Strategy Game
🏅 Zipper 🏅 Sasquatchers 🏅 Conquest of Helios 🏅 Questy Chess

Best Narrative Game
🏅 Casual Birder 🏅 Saturday Edition 🏅 Demon Quest '85 🏅 Bloom

Best App or Nicknack
🏅 A Joke That's Worth $0.99 🏅 Boogie Loops 🏅 France Horn 🏅 Stars of the Screen

General
Most Anticipated Game
🏅 Comet 🏅 Mars after midnight 🏅 P-Racing 🏅 Wastebraver: A Tiny Survival Tale

The CRANKY Award (AKA outstanding use of crank)
🏅 A Balanced Brew 🏅 A Joke That's Worth $0.99 🏅 Crankin's Time Travel Adventure 🏅 Flipper Lifter

Outstanding Technical Achievement in a Pulp Game
🏅 Along Came a Spider 🏅 Art 7 🏅 Castle Helios 🏅 Eyeland

Outstanding Technical Achievement in an SDK Game
🏅 Crankin's Time Travel Adventure 🏅 Daily Driver 🏅 Legend of Etad 🏅 Ratcheteer

Outstanding Pulp Game of the Year
🏅 Along Came a Spider 🏅 Art 7 🏅 Castle Helios 🏅 Eyeland

2022 Playdate Game of the Year

Award Badges

Winner Badge	Nominee Badge

Applied to your Playdate Squad Discord Account and to place proudly on your winning game’s store or page thumbnail. There will be 4 nominees total in each category. One nominee will be the winner.
Art by the wonderful Alastair Low of Lowtek Games.

Itch.io Badge Placement Mockup

The Process

1. Community nominates games for awards via the Community Nomination Form
2. During this time Judges can optionally choose to add extra games into the into the Judging conversation.
   This is for games that may be missed or not be represented in a community popular vote.
3. The top 6 community results + all judge results will give us the internal nominee list to be voted on by the judges.
4. The internal nominee list and Judge Awards Form is sent to the judges
5. At this time Judges are free to squabble, debate, and pull each others hair to make a case for who they think should win.
   Then they vote.
6. In the case of tiebreaks (Winners or runner up), then judges will need to hash it out until they can decide on one winner and three unranked nominees.
   The results are handed over to the hosts.

The Judges

Don, Nick, and Ryan of Hello Playdate Podcast - Three friends that share their love of the Playdate game system on a weekly podcast. What we love about these three, is that their opinions of each Playdate game differ greatly, making each one of them unique in their views. They will be a great addition to a judging panel and have extensively played many released games while being very active community members as well.

AttackSlug of Destination Playdate - AttackSlug is a machine and has reviewed over 70 Playdate games while consistently uploading review videos of them to his YouTube channel since the beginning. He will be a stellar addition in selecting quality games that have been released.

Drew-lo and Orkn - Two unpublished developers that are active in the developer forum and in the community while they work on their games. We wanted to choose unpublished devs, as they won’t be biased towards their very own released games but can bring a technical eye to judging.
Drew has worked on many SDK codebases during his development of Mobware Minigames.
Orkn is a creative mind in the Pulp community having published many prototypes that broaden what you think can be achieved in the tool.

Christa Mrgan and Arisa Sudangnoi - Our two Panic superstars! We are so thankful to be adding two members of Panic to the judging panel. Not only are they both active in the community, they are also exposed to many of the developers and games in the Playdate Universe.

FAQ

Why doesn't the community vote on everything?

At first, we asked ourselves “Why can’t the community just vote on all the awards?” Well, after we thought about this, we realized that this would put some games and creators at a severe disadvantage and turn the awards show into more of a popularity/visibility contest if the community was able to decide everything. The community will still have a huge part in deciding the nominees, but we’ve created a diverse set of judges that will also offset any chance of games or creators winning due to their ability to market their game or obtain more visibility. Some developers simply do not have the resources other companies and games have, so it is possible that their game may not receive a popular vote. With our judging committee active, they will be able to bring these games and creators to the forefront that may be more deserving of the award than a game that could win due to high visibility or a popular vote.

Why didn't you do the process another way?

We feel the process above was the best way forward based on the time we and the judges have.
We are open to feedback next year.

How did you decide on the award categories?

The awards were iterated on over a two week period with input from members in the Playdate Squad Discord server.
For the most part, our Genre Categories have been modeled off of The Game Awards, but were tweaked to fit the current Playdate catalog.