A relaxed 12 day game jam similar to the 12 Days of Sketchmas. The jam officially runs from 0:00 on Valentines Day until 23:59 on the 26th of Feb. However, I said this is a relaxed jam, I'm well aware that on a longer game jam life tends to get in the way and as such you have an additional 5 days, until the end of Sunday the 1st of March, to submit your game(s).

How It Works

The rules are simple. Create a small game/sketch of a game every day for the 12 days that the jam officially runs for. You are free to use whatever engine you see fit, bonus points for an open source engine like Godot or Amethyst (we have a list of open source/free/freemium engines on the Discord server). Super extra points if you fancy using the newly released Godot 3.2 stable release. If you'd rather create a small print-and-playable tabletop game, that's also acceptable.

There are at least two ways you can tackle this. The first and simplest is to create a new mechanic for your game each day. By the end of it you will havea game with 12 simple mechanics. For example movement, trading, attack, defence, etc it's up to you how low/high level you want to make the distinction between mechanics.

The second way is to create 1 small game each day. By the end of the jam you will have 12 teeny tiny games.

Another way to tackle this might be to create 1 doodle sized game on day 1, 2 doodle sized games on day 2, all the way to 12 on day 12. This is probably the hardest method and I fully expect no one to be mad enough to try it.

You could also spend a few days creating the core game and then the rest of the jam creating levels/content for the game, one for each remaining prompt.

Remember, the goal of the jam is to give you something productive and fun to do in any downtime you might have. You shouldn't take it too seriously and don't worry if you get behind or have to drop out. Most importantly don't make your games too complicated (Something I'm always guilty of& in game jams).

The only rules are that the project must be started during the jam period and to use assets you have the rights to (see the Assets section below for more information). Please don't submit games you are already working on or games you already submitted to other jams.

Submissions

Hey, you said the jam ends on the 26th, why are submissions open until the 1st?

This may seems strange, normally game jams limit submissions to maybe a few hours after the official deadline however I want this jam to be as stress-free and productive as possible with the minimum number of people getting disheartened and abandoning their projects. The original concept was for the art jam which needs no extension however I realised with the Sketchmas game jam people may need more time to work around family commitments

If people really don't like this style of submission deadline I'm open to change it for any future iterations.

If you are going to create a lot of small games you are free to submit each day's creation as a separate file or more preferably create a single game with a main menu that has a list of each entry, somewhat like those old anthology cartridges you'd get on consoles like the Mega Drive/NES.

Of course, if you're making one game for the whole jam, this isn't a concern, just upload it as normal.

You are free to release your games under any license you see fit but if you feel able, a permissive open source license would be great so people can see how you did stuff and learn cool new techniques.

Assets

You are free to use any art/sound assets you have the right to use. This could be assets from an existing game you've made to Creative Commons/CC0 assets on sites like OpenGameArt.org. The idea of the jam is to put something theme-related together in a short space of time each day. You are of course also free to create everything from scratch each day.

Discussion

If you want to get involved we have an official Discord for the 12 Days of Sketchmas game and art jams.

Voting

After submissions end there will be a week of voting.

For this jam there is a new voting criteria: "Asset coherence" explained below.

Theme - How well did the game/games fit the prompts for the game

Creativity - How unique is the game

Asset Coherence - Given that free assets can be used how well did the entry use the assets to create a sense of a single product/project. Do the assets feel like they belong together or do they feel like a jumble of unrelated pieces. Does the game still feel OK without the coherence?

Prompts

Prompts will be released 24 hours before the jam starts so you can plan how you want to tackle your submission(s).

• Day 1 - Pair (14^th)
• Day 2 - Candle (15^th)
• Day 3 - Consumption (16^th)
• Day 4 - Creation (17^th)
• Day 5 - Connection (18^th)
• Day 6 - Relationship (19^th)
• Day 7 - Broken (20^th)
• Day 8 - Outing (21^st)
• Day 9 - Missing (22^nd)
• Day 10 - Transport (23^rd)
• Day 11 - Liquid (24^th)
• Day 12 - Acceleration (25^th)

12 Days of Sketchruary - Art Jam

I'm also running a similar style art jam in which you can participate either instead of or alongside the game jam at https://sketchmas.drentsoft.com. The prompts will be different and are released at the start of the art jam. Submissions will be through Twitter or the Discord server using the hashtag provided.