Introduction

We’ve all been there. You join a jam you’re super excited about. You’ve got great ideas, big plans, and a game you genuinely care about making. Then suddenly there’s an hour left before the deadline and you just have to get something, anything, submitted.

That’s a feature, not a bug. We all need that push to actually get things out the door.

But invariably, there are a lot of things you would have done differently if you’d had more time. Little details you never got around to. Controls you meant to tighten up. Visual feedback you wanted to add. Sound effects that were placeholders right up until submission. Menus? Who needs em. Tutorial levels? Heck being inscrutable is a feature, not a bug, right?

That’s what this jam is about. Taking something that was already a diamond in the rough and turning it into just a straight-up shiny diamond.

Rules

• The game must have previously participated in a game jam before being entered here.
• There must be at least one major update or polish pass made specifically for this jam.
• Your submission must include a devlog describing what you did to polish the game.

Judging

Games will be judged on how polished they are.

That means things like:

• Is it easy to figure out how to play?
• Do the controls feel good?
• Are the graphics and sound working well together?
• Is the game loop fun for more than 5 minutes?
• Does the overall experience feel smooth and satisfying?

I think we all have an intuitive sense of what “polish” means, even if it’s hard to define precisely.

If you’re making a minimal retro platformer, polished is going to mean something very different than if you’re making a 3D FPS targeting the latest RTX ray tracing rendering pipelines.

The point is not scope. The point is taking a game that already had potential and giving it the level of care and refinement it didn’t have time for during the original jam.