The post-jam event is not over yet as voting is still underway and Kyle hasn't gotten to the rest of the entries. But I'm curious as to how everyone liked the jam event so far. I'm not making this on Kyle's behalf but might be helpful to organize people's thoughts. Any opinions on the rules/structure or how things generally went? 

My thoughts:

I love the "prompt" usually game jams have a one word theme as a guideline but I like it when there are coherent things to follow yet a lot can still be done with them.  I regret not doing a game about Mint now that I've seen so many entries of her done. I also feel bad about Waffle not getting a game (maybe a way to track that sort of stuff next time?). In general I am very entertained by this loose video game universe we created as if a franchise was constantly being rebooted and spinoff'd to the point of inconsistent lore, yet also being consistent in other aspects.

Some things I think might have got people is the clarification on the deadline, what does the deadline entail, how serious of a jam is this that 1.0 is the only thing that gets in.  Personally I think having a strict upload deadline and a soft send your 1.1 to kyle deadline works for me. Yet I didn't really know the specifics of that until the stream. 

Also worth mentioning is rules on what is allowed regarding resources, I think music that can be picked up by Twitch was brought up as a nono but many jams usually have stipulations on whether or not presets are allowed (which is a thorny topic because pretty much all of us use presets or a game engine that might as well be classified as a preset so it's really hard to define). 

For me personally I learned a lot from the jam, or rather, I got used to a lot of things in the jam. It's my 3rd Godot game and my first time making an RPG that wasn't rpgmaker. RPGs are no joke and have a lot of subsystems and menus for each of those systems within systems. I think the 1 month length is doable to make an RPG happen, but it takes a bit of practice. The most IRL exp I got out of it was just churning out a bunch of cutscenes, this is the most story I've ever done for a game jam entry due to the nature of the event and naturally I had no time to tune the gameplay, but it was worth it because lore contribution is fun.

I loved the prompt of the game jam as well. Each character was so unique and could be taken in different directions in different genres and could even interact with each other in interesting ways (like in Dungeon of Alexandria, which is my personal #1 atm). I learned quite a bit about making a board game this past month, and I enjoyed seeing other people's takes on the characters, and how vastly different yet equally cool they were from my version

I kind of wish he had set up a game lineup showing what order he would play the games. Because it was like 530am in my time zone when he started playing my game and I could have been more prepared to warn him about certain rules or even dropped a link to the board game setup in the chat. Not that big a deal though as the game went over well and he managed to see most of the cards we made, and I had a ton of fun watching everyone react to losing friends.

It's good to know that we can keep updating our games, although I kind of have this feel that once Kyle streams it, that's it, as most of the non-participants in the chat will likely only see that single iteration...

Anyway, this just means I have to try to pump out the printable version as fast as I can

I really agree with RPGs being hard to make due to all the systems you need to account for, even if those systems are generally not used that much in the final game.

I was very stressed about my game just completely falling apart in some way I hadn't accounted for on stream, thankfully everything held up for the most part, I already have ideas on what I could do to improve the existing systems and additional content but ultimately I think I'll leave it as is and take a break from making games in my free time for a while. Next jam I take part in I'll either work with a group or do something a lot smaller in scope.

As for presets, I think it makes the jam a lot more inclusive to let people use assets packs/system presets as long as the developer is very transparent on what is theirs and what isn't, it also makes what others made from scratch/themselves more impressive in comparison.

I also really enjoyed the prompt. I especially appreciated that story and character investment were part of the ratings. I feel that story is often overlooked in jams, and it was super fun to explore the characters and see everyone's interpretations. I actually feel the opposite of Shweep, glad that I changed from my initial instinct to make a Mint game because she ended up being so popular (though I underestimated how popular Alexandria would be haha).

I think it's fair to allow small updates/bug fixes after the deadline, especially when it's issues of content not being able to be seen (like we had). It's also something we can't strictly control anyway, due to how itch handles the game pages. I trust the integrity of this community to not 'cheat' and add content after the deadline.

This was my first game jam done with a team, and I'd highly recommend it if you can find the right people. It helped so much having others to bounce ideas off of, especially with the story stuff. Our game wouldn't have been nearly as polished (or have such great character art) if I did it all alone.

I loved the set up for this jam. It left it open to be super creative for the designers and as BughuniTeams said, the fact that character investment was part of it pushed me to try and come up with a decent story. Story has never been a focus for me over mechanics and gameplay, but here I focused a lot of my efforts on story. And I discovered how much it adds! I think this is now my favourite game I've made. 

I think usually I would be all for being able to update the game after the deadline, however it feels a bit iffy for the people games that were streamed on Wednesday. I think a lot of people will watch the streams and not play the games, meaning if your game was being played on Friday you had a lot more time to polish it. Hopefully you're right and nobody took advantage of this too much. I hope this doesn't come across as moaning, because I'm so grateful to see Kyle play my game and for chat being so kind. I guess I just hope that when the voting is done, it feels like it was fair.

As for resources I agree that as long as the developers are open about what they did and didn't create I think anything is fair game. I totally understand what you are saying Shweep (as I created everything from graphics and programming to music), but I think it being accessible is also important to a jam like this. I was lucky that I had the time to spend every waking second in this when I wasnt working. I understand a lot of people would not have that. 

Overall, I absolutely loved this jam. The creations are awesome, the characters that Kyle and Chat made are awesome and the streams were super fun to watch. Would I do another? I dont know because my anxiety and stress levels were through the roof! But by the next one I'll probably just be left with the good memories (like Kyle's live reaction to the end of my game and all chats lovely words). So yeah. I probably will.

Also, to all the people in chat who were saying such nice things about my game, if you read this, thank you from the bottom of my heart. It made all thoughs 3am nights worth it.