Welcome to the IGU Winter Jam!

This is the fourth Indie Game Utopia game jam, and the goal is simple. You will have from Jan. 15 at 12:00 PM CEST to Jan. 29 at 12:00 PM CEST to create a game. After that, all participants will be able to vote on each other's entries, and the winner will be announced on Feb. 5.

The theme of the jam is "lights". Lights are everywhere. The sun, the moon which glows in the night sky, lanterns, and so on, and these lights can represent different things. As always, use your imagination!

Use the #IGUWinterJam hashtag on Twitter and we will retweet your stuff.

Joining the jam:

To join, first join the Discord server, if you're not already a server member. After joining, you can start working on your submission on your own or find people in the server to form a team. 

Prizes:

1. A special "Game Jam Winner" role in the Discord server to let everyone know that you won the jam.
2. An itch.io key for a game of the winner's choosing.

Rules:

1. Respect each other.
2. No harassment. This includes, but is not limited to: stalking, sending death threats, unwanted sexual advances, doxxing, baiting or personal attacks.
3. No hate speech. This includes, but is not limited to: sexist, racist, homophobic, biphobic, transphobic, ableist, antisemitic or classist language or calling for violence against a person or group of people. When these behaviors are targeted at another person who's taking part in the game jam, it also counts as harassment.
4. No NSFW submissions.
5. Each participant or group of participants only gets one submission.
6. No troll submissions.
7. No submissions that contain illegal material.
8. No submissions that require additional hardware, like VR games or games that can only be played with a controller, because not everyone has those devices and all participants should be able to play each game that gets submitted.
9. No submissions that require you to download additional files that don't come with the game.
10. No NFT or crypto stuff. This includes submissions that promote NFTs or links to sites where you can buy or sell them.
11. All game assets must either be your own work, other people's work that you have been given permission to use, or work that is in the public domain/falls under a license that allows you to use it. The original creator(s) must be properly credited. If you are found to be using stolen content in your submission, your submission will be disqualified and the Discord server mods might take further action against you if the situation calls for it.
12. The main point here is to have fun. It's fine to have a bit of fun competition, but keep it friendly, don't let it get to the point where it gets toxic.
13. For team projects, we have a 1-signup-per-team rule. Also, all team members should be clearly specified.

The four criteria that the game will be rated on:

1. Fun: How fun is the game to play and does it have replay value?
2. Graphics: How good does it look?
3. Music / Sound Design: How good is the music and the sound effects?
4. Concept: How interesting is the concept?

Link to the Indie Game Utopia Discord server

Link to the IGU Twitter account

Legal notes:

After the jam is over, all participants retain ownership of their work. Feel free to keep working on your game after the jam is over.