Update: The theme is Obfuscation.

Greetings Bale of Esoturtles and bits & Bytes members, and welcome to our first crossover game jam!

That's right! People from both Discord servers get to participate!

It's simple: Make a game in 15 days, and have fun while doing it (That's an order). It's a great opportunity to learn a bit about game development, and at the end, you'll have something that you can be proud of.

Once the submission period ends, everyone who has submitted will be able to check out and vote on other people's submissions.

What is a Bale of Esoturtles/bits & Bytes?

Our two servers overlap a bit in membership, so we thought this might be a fun thing to try! Both servers have a lot of members interested in programming, as well as a variety of other topics.

bits & Bytes is a small and cozy Discord server, but in spite of that it tends to be fairly active, and it even has its own Minecraft server. You can join it here: discord.gg/xv9vGhZutg

Bale of Esoturtles is the Discord server owned by Truttle1, who makes YouTube videos about esoteric programming languages and other programming-related topics. You can join it here: discord.gg/EKPBjjUc65

Rules

1. Don't take code someone else wrote and present it as your own. Third-party assets are allowed, as long as you give credit and have the right to use them. AI-generated code and assets are allowed, as long as most of the game is still human-made.

2. Don't include anything that's NSFW or offensive/discriminatory.

3. Your game must support running either on Windows, Linux, or in a web browser. Game engines like Unity and Godot support exporting to any of these no matter your OS. Writing your game in a language like JavaScript is also an easy way to get it running in the browser. Languages like Java and C# make it easy to run on any major OS, though not the web.

4. When submitting, you will be asked to provide the source code of your game. This is to avoid people submitting malware, and because it's neat to be able to see how other people coded their games.

5. You may use existing code and assets, though we will have to ask that you don't make anything specifically for the jam before it starts. You can however set up your project, make a GitHub repo, set up an Itch profile, etc.

6. This is primarily a solo jam. Only one person may have a hand in the programming of each game, though other community members may assist with assets, for example, by recording voice lines.

Criteria

1. Originality: To what extent is the game based on an original idea?

2. Fun: How enjoyable is the game to play?

3. Theme: How well does the game adhere to the theme of the jam?

4. Visual design: How good does it look?

5. Sound design: How good does it sound?

4. Overall: Allows people to account for things that aren't covered by the other criteria.

Any questions? Chat to staff on either server and we'll see what we can do!

Good luck!