itch.io

I wanted to see how this jam is treating everyone, as there are just about 4 days left. 

Hi everyone,

since we only got one entry this time, there won't really be too much judging going on. I would like to ask feedback and suggestions for future jams. Was the month a bad time to run a jam? And for the theme, one piece of feedback I got was to stop explaining the theme and just go with a blanket statement, any thoughts on that?

I hope everyone is having a good weekend, I wanted to see how progress is coming as we're coming down to the home stretch for the jam.

If you couldn't attend the live stream, the archive of it is now up: 

Here is the link to the stream 

I'll be posting the link to the stream here about 30 minutes before it starts for the people who aren't on the discord.

We have a time and date locked for the judging stream. It will be next Thursday 9/7 at 6 pm ET. I'll be playing the games with the judges as well. If anyone wants to hop on the discord chat to talk about their game either before or after we play theirs, please let me know

Now that the development part of the game jam is over, I want to ask everyone some thoughts about the jam, feedback, etc.

First, any suggestions or feedback about things that could be made better/clearer for future ones? I'm thinking going forward, to set the deadline for submissions to just 10 days, and start it on a Friday. My goal is that I want the entire jam, including judging be done in one month.

Second, people have expressed interest in doing more of these and I'm happy to oblige. I'm thinking maybe one a quarter, AKA, one every three months, is that too many, or is that good?

Now the big one. For this first one and hitting 10k subscribers, is why I set a prize for the winning team. There is no way I can afford to give a prize and support myself if this becomes a regular thing without asking for some kind of entry fee. If this is okay with everyone, I'm thinking the fee would be like $10-$15,  and the first $200 of it would go towards the prize pool for first place, anything else would go towards supporting me and the channel. If this does blow up, and we're talking a lot of entries and money, then I would expand the prize pool and maybe offer something for second and third place as well. If people don't want an entry fee, I'm fine with continuing it, but there would obviously not be a prize going forward other than bragging rights

And finally, to update people on what's happening next. I'm talking with my three judges now to set up a time for doing a special live showcase/judging stream of the entries for next week, after that's over, the judges and I will make final scoring and I'll put out a video to award the top three entries soon after.

With the voting done for whether to extend the deadline, I have given everyone one more week to get submissions in. This is going to be the only extension for the jam, and going forward, I may just keep things at 10 days. The jam page has been updated, but the new deadline is 8/28/23 at midnight.

I have a vote on my discord for this now https://discord.com/channels/280058784565428224/1130600366627635245/114153449864... and I'll be tallying things up tomorrow evening

I received a comment on my discord about wanting to know if I would consider extending the time of the game jam by one week and I wanted to know what everyone thinks of that. If enough people would like a longer deadline, I'm fine with making things two weeks for this and future jams, but I also don't want this to turn into too long of a commitment for people.

For people who are having trouble coming up with a concept for the theme. Here's a tip I gave on the discord. Take a genre that you don't like for a specific aspect of it, and see how you would change it and turn it on its head.

In case things don't update, the main page and discord channel, are updated with the theme for the jam:

The theme for our first game jam is: Opposite Day: Your challenge is to take a game mechanic/system, or genre qualifier -- something that is considered vital when defining a game, and do the opposite of it. This doesn't mean creating a bad or janky version of that genre, but to do something that would be the opposite of what we would normally expect out of this gameplay loop.

If you're looking for people, we have a thread on my discord for planning and organizing teams https://discord.gg/MFdkhMz

thanks for letting me know, making the amend now.

Hi everyone, as a quick update about the judging and time frame. I have four judges including me on deck. With the number of signups, I'm extending the judging period by 4 days to 9/4 to give everyone enough time to play all the submissions we hopefully get.

thanks, we'll see how many submissions we end up getting :)