There’s a little more than 60 days until Spooktober 2025. Year after year, the Spooktober Visual Novel Jam has experienced meteoric growth in terms of participants and submissions. To date, the Spooktober Visual Novel Jam 2024 has had the most submissions out of any other visual novel jam, and Spooktober as a whole has contributed to the creation of over 800 visual novels. That’s huge, and I’d like to thank all of you for helping make this happen.
This year, we anticipate breaking our submission record again.
I wish I could say this is a universally good thing.
While the participation and submissions in the jam grow significantly year after year, our ability to manage the jam does not. Last year, we had 7 judges responsible for judging and eventually ranking 272 submissions in less than 30 days. On average, a judge had to review 70 entries in around 21 days each to maintain the standard of quality and review that we’ve kept for the past 6 years. Ask any of them. It’s a staggering and taxing task despite the joy it brings us.
Recruiting new judges has been met with significant difficulty, since many people we would consider experts in this simply are not available to take on the tremendous workload at hand, and without more judges we cannot promise a lighter quantity of work per judge. This creates a bit of a catch 22 when recruiting.
I prefer to do good business when I can. I don’t take sponsorship money from people I don’t think a sponsorship with us could actually help. Similarly, I can’t keep asking the judges, who have been loyal and enduring despite the hardships, to continue at the rate they’re going. We are fully expecting to only have 5-7 judges this year, and the jam is trending towards 300 submissions this year. Worst case scenario, we're looking at judges needing to review somewhere near 120-150 entries each to maintain our standards. We need a method of allowing Spooktober to grow and continue to be the event that inspires and drives developers to do their best while mitigating the administrative strain the event causes.
That’s why this year we’re introducing a judging pass.
Here’s how it’s changed:
- Everyone is still able to participate and compete in Spooktober 2025.
- Special categories will be nominations based, with public vote ranking taken into consideration in addition to community and judge nominations. Judges will continue to review the nominations and select winners there. (Roughly 6~ entries per category.)
- The 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place prizes require a Judge Pass to qualify a team for consideration.
- Judge passes also entitle participants to pitch and present in a special competitive Meet & Greet, focused on helping people find teams and team members seeking to compete for the grand prizes. This Meet & Greet is scheduled August 16th, and purchase of a Judge Pass is required BEFORE that date in order to present.
- Judge passes are available now via the Patreon shop for $10 USD. We will stop selling these passes September 15th. Your order number is your Judge Pass number, so make note of it.
- The goal of this pass is to reduce the total number of entries the judges need to review from 250-300 to 100 or less. This would amount to each judge only needing to review 30-40 entries each and permit us to continue judging at the quality we want to maintain.
Proceeds from the passes will be given to the judges to thank them for their time or given back to the community at their discretion.
The pass is available here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/2025-spooktober-131500676