Helowitz mouse-cord's very first Game Jam!

INTRODUCTION

This is a game jam designed around twitch streamer helloitsmouse's Discord community, a.k.a. mousecord. You have 7 days to make a game from start to finish, either alone or in a group, following the theme that was revealed on mousecord, which is...

Unlikely Pairings

Best of luck to everyone participating! if you have any questions or doubts, please read the rules below.

RULES

GENERAL

• Keep communication light and civil: this is a small community game jam for fun, and the stakes for "winning" are low.
• All submissions must follow the rules set in the Mousecord's #discord-rules, as if you are posting in the server itself. This includes no hate speech or other offensive content. Games must be SFW. If any darker topics are covered, please include appropriate content warnings. 
• Teams of 1 - 4 people, if you're unsure who counts then please ask. There will be a game jam channel to help find teams and discuss your works in progress.
• Team members should be users in Mousecord, as this is a Mousecord community game jam - though regular community members on a break from Discord are welcome to join a team as long as there is a representative in the server. People who are banned from Mousecord are ineligible to join at all.
• If you are found to have maliciously broken the rules of the Jam, depending on the severity you may be declared ineligible for future Mousecord community events, including community riddles and other group events, or banned from the Discord entirely.

ASSETS and CONTENT

As mentioned previously, all content in your game must adhere to the rules of Mousecord itself. Additionally:

• Assets should be in majority created by members of the team during the Game Jam period.
• Assets not created by the team are acceptable but must be disclosed and correctly attributed. They may affect eligibility for relevant judging categories.
• You may not submit a project featuring AI generated assets or content (visuals/audio/writing).
• Examples:
• Permitted assets:  Fonts, Code libraries
• Assets that may affect judging: Generic background music loops, stock imagery, stock sounds
• Forbidden assets: Pre-made characters or tilemaps, non-free or copyrighted material
• THIS IS NOT AN EXHAUSTIVE LIST. Please ask if you are unsure if an asset is okay to use in your project or not.

SUBMISSION

• Your team should designate one person to submit your game to itch.io. You will need an account with itch.io for this; other methods of submission will not be accepted.
• The submission deadline will not be extended for any reason. Files can be added and edited at any point during the submission period, so it's recommended that you make an early submission on the day before the deadline and edit it later.
• Your submission should:
• Work out of the box without any external dependencies (e.g. don't make us self compile it, or download external software to play it)
• Contain a working build at least for the browser or windows (additional platforms are still permitted and encouraged if possible)
• Contain credits on the submission form and itch.io page, optionally in/alongside the game
• Credits should include:
• All participating team members
• The extent of all team member's contributions
• Any and all third party assets used
• Attribution even for assets that wouldn't otherwise require it (including public domain, CC0, etc.)

DATES and TIMES

Times given in UTC +00:00, dates given in dd/mm/yyyy

• 12/12/2025 - 22:00: theme revealed, jam starts
• 19/12/2025 - 22:00: jam ends, judging starts
• 11/01/2026 - 22:00: community voting ends, results revealed shortly after.

JUDGING

The judges will decide on winners for the following categories:

• Visuals - How good does the game look
• Audio - How good does the game sound (in terms of both SFX and music)
• Theme - How well does the game apply the theme
• Writing - How well is the game written (including dialogue and story structure, if applicable)
• General - A combination of all the above

Separate from the judge's categories, community voting will be enabled on the game jam to determine an overall winner