I'm deferring to Deckiller on this one.

I do have a very minor "accessibility of gameplay" category in my judging criteria, which basically means "were the controls, known bugs, or possible installation pitfalls either totally implicit or explained somewhere in the game or download?" If all a player would do in your game was walk around and push 'a' at things, that's implicit and that's fine. If you had super complex controls and never explained them, or you required wacky things in order to get the download to work and never included a readme explaining how to do those wacky things, I would've made a note of it.

Even still, that's a very minor category in my overall rubric. The things I really focused on were ease of gameplay, quality of experience (which I know is very subjective), and overall feeling of polish.

I don't know if sharing that out in the open is going to ignite some kind of a flamewar, but I'd like to be relatively transparent as a judge.

author=Indra
And that's...I think...I mean...it's the RTP. In a RM SITE. Why is that an issue, they're like the main supported program :/

People throw this around like it's a legitimate defense. But the fact is that there is nothing ambiguous about the submission rules. It clearly states that all files have to be included in the download. If that line had been omitted then I could infer that "yeah, RTPs are probably not required". But in this case it actually explicitly says to include the RTP.

I will get the most important bit out of the way first here: I WILL play all the games. So don't worry if you didn't follow rules.

Now then I will clarify some of my reasoning. I have to admit that the reason I volunteered to judge is because I actually read the submission rules and the bit with "all the required files must be included" and I thought "I can judge this because this means I won't have to bother with all those RTPs." Of course in the back of my mind I also had the trolling mode on thinking something along the lines of "then I can call out the noobs who forgot to include the RTP and scorn them for not following the rules and thus furthering my fundamentalist standalone agenda."

Though I thought that maybe a couple of people would fail to follow the rules and a good time be had by all. Not that over half of the entrants would just ignore rules just because they either have no reading comprehension or just "assumed" something that was directly contradictory to the rules themselves!

I'm making this out to be a bigger issue than it is but I think there is a valuable lesson somewhere in the importance of actually following guidelines. You don't submit your short story in some weird format for a short story collection and then just say "oh yeah you just have to download this program to read that file".

Also when I judge I tend to start from the very basics. Pretending to be an idiot (though a somewhat informed one). First I look for some kind of text files with instructions/a manual then when playing I tend to see if there are in-game instructions on how to play the game. When making a game, even if it's for a short contest like this there is really no excuse not to tell people what buttons they are supposed to use. Basic things like "Do I move with the arrows keys or with WASD or do I click the mouse where I want to go?" it's good if they are there and it's not much work. The least anyone can ask for is for someone to spend two minutes writing a short readme with controls.

I'll end my rant with:

And if a JUDGE of all people can't be bothered to download eve the basic tools that's...honestly a bit worrying.

If a DEVELOPER of all people can't be bothered to even include the most basic instructions on how to play or run a game that's... honestly a bit worrying.