I was wondering if maybe this website had plans to host a game jam in the near future?
I love those and I’d love to see what everyone else here would make.
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Now there’s an idea. Definitely something we can look into in the future I suppose.
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this is a thing id definitely love to see happening
ooh, +1 to this for sure
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Curious what people here all could come up with.
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Oh I’d be interested in joining for sure, I’ve been thinking about hosting my own even as of late… I’ve learned 2 weeks of a jam is the sweet spot for me to get things done with a small scope and still have a good time to polish stuff
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It’s been a few years since my last jam - work/life has really taken up all my time lately. But I’d also be interested!
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I like this idea very much but have the following thoughts:
- It should have clear rules and stipulations to avoid any kind of self-imposed crunch and give people who have just a few hours free a week a chance to participate meaningfully, especially if we do ranking. I’ve participated in a few jams myself (loooong) ago, but have never been part of organizing one and would like to do it right.
- I’d like some kind of angle or gimmick to bring more people into the forum. The jam itself would probably be hosted on itch.io because they have the infrastructure for such a thing, but it’s also a cool promotional opportunity to bring more awesome people here, and I want to take advantage of that to help grow the forum.
- The third thing has escaped me but I’m sure it’ll come back soon.
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true a game jam can be most easily hosted on itch.io
but an art jam can be hosted entirely here, just sayin’
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one thing I do for the GBTK jam is give people 2 weekends to make something. 9 days total but they are expected to spend 2.
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The last jam I took part in had a very wide grace period for late entries. 2 weeks of development time, 1 week of voting, a day or so of extra time for late entries (but it seemed to me like some entries were coming in even later, so I think that was at the host’s discretion there)
I think it’s tricky to get others to avoid the crunch, because it’s kind of up to the scope one choses and part of jams is learning what kind of scope you can handle. New jammers will inevitably run into some troubles.
On the point of wanting people to join the forum, it would appear that most hosts direct people to a discord, but maybe it would work by having the main communication be here, perhaps a thread in _creative for discussing the jam that’s pinned, and of course users could make a thread for their own game if they wanna start a devlog. You can prime people for joining by setting up a poll to vote on theme or something before the jam begins.
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Just a thought that ties into this way of thinking, what if we do something like regular jams focused on a specific piece of software? Something like a pico-8 jam or an electric zine maker jam et cetera? This way scope is automatically limited but also expanded in terms of not just limiting ourselves to games.
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i really like this idea! having an “art jam” kinda thing (or things) seems like a great way to help build up an entire community
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As much as I like pico-8 I feel like I’m super duper slow in it compared to other things nowadays because of the limitations lol
I do like the art idea though, could spice it up with some limitations, I am a sucker for limited palettes like the stuff on lospec.com or even limited resolution, but I’d bet small resolutions might be difficult to see embedded without some css shenanigans
Pico-8 is just an example of course. We can compile a whole list of fun low-barrier-to-entry things.
Could even do a jam that’s just writing.
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I usually try to do one jam/year, so it would be great if at least one of them would be on this community!
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a variety of creative genres sounds nice :3 i like the idea of not doing just game jams, also ive never done a writing jam? that sounds real fun actually
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Actually yeah, I’ve never done creative writing at all really, it’s something I want to learn and get good at for games though.
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Okay, so I’ve been doing some more thinking about this, and I feel like I’m a solid 80% of the way to making this happen. First, I’ve enabled the Calendar and Events plugin on the back end. You may have noticed the new “Upcoming events” link on the sidebar. This basically allows me to set events on a calendar and lets members join in and get notified when an event starts, so that’s a nice way to visualize when a jam would be happening. Still thinking about how to present everything in a relatively unified way since the idea remains to have jams for a variety of different media. How do we consistently host submissions that don’t fit into a forum post? Also I’m thinking that at least for the time being we don’t do any ranking or scoring, but just have fun creating. Maybe if the jams/forum grow in scope we can think about making it competitive in some way, but for right now I think it’s best to focus on learning and trying new things.
On the topic of frequency, I like the idea of doing a regular jam so that there’s often opportunity to join in if life lets you. My thinking is every two months we do a two week period of jam with a very limited scope. All of the jams will have a prompt and a strong limitation. Something like “Write a short story about the beginning of a world” but no longer than 1500 words. This way we can accommodate everyone’s personal pacing, way of working, and free time. Some people would pump those 1500 words out in an afternoon and others could leisurely write 100 or so words a day.
The other thing I could use help with is compiling software and artforms to jam through. Main thing has to be that they’re free and easily accessible. I’ve already mentioned Electric Zine Maker, but you can of course think of stuff like Bitsy and especially tools that are fun to play with and can both help those of us who feel less confident about our creativity and those of us who feel like we get in a bit over our heads when it comes to the technicals. So if we get a nice long list of candidates I can start choosing them and laying them out over the next months, or we can vote on them, whatever works best.
Other than that I’d also like to figure out a nice way to showcase everyone’s work and promote it wherever we can, so maybe I’ll work on a post template or something like that.
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This sounds perfect to me, would be a lot of fun to have to work with mediums/tools I have no experience in. Every two months is regular enough that it wouldn’t feel too much pressure to get involved in every one but still feels like an event
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