Thank you to everyone who participated in this year’s jam! The wait is finally over—check out the winners, special awards, and judge favorites here: https://itch.io/jam/rpg-maker-2025-game-jam

There were so many incredible entries this year that narrowing down the winners was no easy task. If your game didn’t make the final list, don’t be discouraged. Just finishing and submitting a game is something to be proud of!

We also want to acknowledge the inconvenience caused by entries being locked during the extended judging period. We really appreciate your patience and will be re-evaluating how we handle that in future events.

We’ll be sharing prize details very soon so stay tuned!

Wow, I did not expect that. Honored to snag 2nd place amidst a host of great entries! Thanks for all your work organizing the jam, and thanks to all the judges who took time to play through these entries - not a small feat!

Shocked to have won Best Music with Lumi, who is uncredited as a composer but did write two tracks and wrote and "sung" the "lyrics" to the memorable final dungeon theme. There were so many composers entering this jam that I figured I'd get swamped. Lumi and I both agree what got us the win was daring to be different and doing something really out there. Once again very honored to claim this prize, and I'll be posting the soundtrack and a behind-the-scenes devlog by the end of the week!

I'm gonna take this magical moment to plug Buffet Knight: Decadent Full Course by 20th placer Nowis-337. Nowis was the runner-up for the last RPG Maker jam with an early version of this game, and he's fleshed it out into one of the best playing RPG Maker games out there. He also needed an original soundtrack made of 34 genre-transcending Game Boy bangers for it and yeah I think you know where this is going. It's been flying under the radar, so please give it a spin and leave a positive review if you like it! Seeing Buffet Knight blow up would honestly mean way more to me than winning this jam.

Congrats everyone!
And I second @syphyous that disclosure of the judges' scores would be much appreciated!

As a judge I just want to note that there were so many great games this time around it was hard to see what the clear winners would be. Usually, when judging, you have a general idea but not so this time! Everyone really did a wonderful job and even those who might not have scored highly had interesting takes on ideas or fun bits to them that made them worth checking out. I always love judging events like these because the influx of games into the community, the sharing of ideas and inspiration thrown around is always intoxicating. 

Congrats to all the winners, but also to all of those who took part. I know I'm a grump at times during my recordings but just know that I'm proud of anyone who actually released a game for this - it takes SO MUCH to put yourself out there and into a situation where there are so many eyes on you and your creation, and you all deserve a pat on the back for taking part. Thank you so much for sharing your games with us. <3

Hey crew! Also as a judge I'd like to say thank you for making awesome, awesome games! :D Well done to everyone who participated, and much like my friend silversatyr above, I agree that there were SO many great games here that we as judges were constantly discussing our favourite games and the reasons we'd go to bat for them... We had very impassioned discussions about it! I trust my fellow judges, and there was a wide variety of tastes involved. My fellow judges and the organisers put in many hours playing all these games and trying to be as objective as possible when judging. I'm very proud of them throughout the entire process.

Most of all, I'd like to thank you for putting in your time and effort, which are both very valuable resources - and also for being incredibly daring to put yourself out there and give it a go! I view these kinds of events as very important for the culture of gamedev as a whole, and I'm hoping that there's going to be some great talents that come out of this! There already were great games being made by some devs that I already appreciated a lot before this... and some devs that I've been made aware of that made some truly incredible stuff that hits my preferences just right! I follow many new devs on itch now for that very reason.

All in all, pat yourselves on the back for such immense effort. And I hope that the wave of creativity and community that comes out of this will be truly inspiring, and that you'll continue to enjoy making the stuff you love to make. Thanks very much for having me on as a judge. It's been an honour <3

Edit: Oh, and I still plan to write a full review for every jam entry that I played. These reviews often take 5-10 minutes per entry, but I played around 120 entries, so in total that's probably 600-1200 minutes (10-20 hours) without breaks. I'm maybe around 30% through this, and I'll do my best to get through them as quickly as I can <3 (Review-writing can be draining for me lol)