in the descriptions people are usually quite honest about their assets. The rules do say you can use assets from other sources as long as you reference them. But yeah, it is quite a tricky one. Original assets, sprites, sound are more likely to give the game a more innovative feel visually/sonically and perhaps make the game more fun as a result. At the same time, we have very advanced game engines and assets at our disposal nowadays which to someone from 20 odd years ago might seem like ‘cheating’. It’s a fine line. But, at the end of the day, who cares who wins, we’re not going to win anything really. All the people that managed to finish their game have won against themselves. ;-)
Usually people use their own made asset in order to fit it own game theme and graphics style but some games really use asset made by other people and get popular not going to lie that using other people asset is kinda cheat but is fair in this scenario because game jam can't allow us to design better stuff and the events are packed
I want to clear that I don’t think it’s wrong to use premade assets at all, and it’s definitely not cheating as it’s clearly allowed in the rules. I’m talking only about a situation if for example someone got all the sprites from the store that look beautiful and gets the best score in graphics because of that. Are the winners of each category somehow filtered?
Personally, I try to rate games that clearly have original graphics/audio a bit higher than those with premade assets (not that I'd rate those games lowly, but I'd cap it at 3/4 stars for art and audio if that makes sense). I know a lot of other people also give a bit of a boost to the original-asset-using games, so I doubt they'd win in those categories. If they do somehow end up "winning" in those categories then I guess fair play to them
