Greetings, GGJ 2024 participants!

Hello from Scripto, an amazing new way to work together on narrative video games. Originally born in the high-pressure writers' rooms of TV shows like The Late Show and Last Week Tonight, you can think of us as Google Docs for professional script formats. Last year, we started working with indie studios like Finji, Nerial, and Chance Agency to adapt our battle-tested collaborative writing tool to their ambitious narrative pipelines. 

We think it's time to bring Scripto to a broader audience, and so we're thrilled to be making our game-writing tools available, for free, to participants in the 2024 Global Game Jam. We've even just added Ink compatibility, so you can now collaborate on commercial-grade interactive scripts with in-browser error checking and playable prototyping.

We know game jams are all about finding the best tools to do your best work as quickly as possible. Scripto isn't just about a collaborative writing experience, we can also help you get all the "stuff" from your script into your engine through our new public API. Spend less of your precious jam time copying and pasting out of a spreadsheet and spend more time coming up with weird shop items!

So what's the deal?

You can submit any game made with Scripto during GGJ 2024 and be eligible for a cash prize pool juried by an incredible group of brilliant developers, some of whom use Scripto in their own professional work. This is that jury:

• Phenry Ewing (Neo Cab, Firewatch)
• Cara Ellison (God of War, Dreams)
• Nicole He (Unannounced Devolver Digital game)
• Rob Dubbin (Scripto, Colbert, International Jetpack Conference)

One game will win the Stephen Colbert Grand Prize, which includes both $500 and one (1) line of voiceover for your game, performed by Stephen Colbert.

Who should do this?

If you've read this far, we think YOU should do this. Even if you've never made a game before, jams are a great opportunity to link up with skilled developers, designers, artists, audio professionals, and other writers to learn the basics of game creation. Join our discord and we'll even help you form a group with people who complement your skill set. 

Yes, there's a prize pool for this jam, and yes, prizes are awesome. But remember: When you do a game jam, your real prize is your game. Make something you're proud of and the rest will take care of itself.

How to Enter / Rules

It's simple! First, sign up for a FREE Video Game workspace in Scripto, right here. You can add up to two collaborators -- if you find yourself needing more, just contact us in our jam Discord. 

In order to be eligible for this jam, you must use Scripto as part of your workflow for your game. We'll leave it up to you to decide what that means, but we'll also ask you to describe how you used it when submitting. 

The spirit of the Global Game Jam is that teams can earmark any 48-hour period over the week between 1/20 and 1/28 to make a game together. We won't enforce any kind of limit there, and you don't technically have to be registered with the Global Game Jam to participate in this Scripto jam. But we're aligning our support resources and this prize pool with the GGJ, and some of us have been participating in it for decades, so we encourage you to join in the spirit of the jam and seek out a local jam site.

All games must be entered by 5pm PT, 8pm ET on Sunday, January 28th. We expect judging to close by January 30th, but we also don't know how many entries we're getting and these are busy professionals who've agreed to jury the jam, so we're going to be gentle with ourselves if results take longer to tabulate.

Remember join us in our Discord where we'll be offering tips and live support all through the jam.

Prize Information

This jam has a total prize pool of $1,000, to be distributed as follows:

• The People's Prize ($200) - Awarded to the game that receives the most votes from the jam community.
• Silver Medal ($300) - Awarded to the jury's second-place game.
• Stephen Colbert Grand Prize ($500) - Awarded to the jury's first-place game. In addition to the cash prize, television's Stephen Colbert (himself a co-founder of Scripto) will perform one (1) line of voiceover for your winning game, to be chosen by Stephen himself.

Fine print and edge cases:

• Judges and Scripto employees MAY enter this jam, but they are not eligible for prize consideration. If a judge or Scripto employee should win The People's Prize, the jury will instead award that amount to a non-conflicted game of their choosing.
• Last but not least...

Have fun!