This is for the whole community to share knowledge. If you have any questions regarding the jam - ask here. If you don’t know where to post a question, here is a good place! If you have any advice to others - also a good place.
Hi! Some advice:
Don’t leave creating the game’s jam entry to the last moment. Remember you have to publish it before submitting it for the jam! From 3 game jams I attended, 2 times I failed to submit my game in time :D Fool me twice :(
Don’t be shy to advertise your games in the jam’s community. That’s ok. The jam is community graded, so other accounts who submitted an entry will grade your game. People tend to play more of the games they know exist. In big jams your game will just sink if you don’t advertise it. Our jam is tiny, but still, why not brag about your creation?
If you are not sure if you have the time to work on a project for a whole week, remember you can create a tiny demo in one day and submit it. Still it’s fun and shows support!
Share your own game jam experiences and advice!
Another piece of advice when submitting your game is to try to make it playable without downloading it. This will allow people to play it without using up storage or worrying about viruses. Having the game open through the web just makes it much easier to access and should make people more willing to play your game.
Might be good to fix this:
Because July 18 and July 25 are very much not Wednesdays. (I hope both are meant to be Fridays for 7 day total jam, rather than Wednesdays for a shorter total time)
Also also, I'd suggest a voting period of at least two weeks; even if half of currently declared people submitted an entry, that would make for over 40 entries to play over a week, which is tricky if you don't have much free time. And even if for some people 2 weeks won't be enough, it should still result in individual people's more complete voting, which means more feedback for everyone and somewhat fairer results.
Also also, I’d suggest a voting period of at least two weeks; even if half of currently declared people submitted an entry, that would make for over 40 entries to play over a week, which is tricky if you don’t have much free time. And even if for some people 2 weeks won’t be enough, it should still result in individual people’s more complete voting, which means more feedback for everyone and somewhat fairer results.
I can’t preview how other jams do it nowadays, I configured this how I remember the last jam I attended was configured :D But you make a good point.
I planned to use rating queue of the size 5, and allow out-of-queue rating after 5 ratings.
AFAIK as a participant you don’t have to rate any games to get a score in itch game jam. So basically the participants will get 2 weeks to vote, but they might need it or not.
I have this idea: What if we end voting on Tuesday, July 29 @ 23:59. Then we would have one day (July 30) break to take a look at the results, do some moderation (i hope not necessary), prepare the movies etc. Then July 31 at, say 18:00 UTC we publish the results?
And this will be the final bell of the initiative, so everyone will go BBQ celebrating it’s success:) Is this a good plan?
I request community’s feedback, please :)
Yeah, Tuesday would be fine. At least participants would get two weekends' worth instead of one, so they could knock quite a few games down back then. And yes, I know in itch.io jams you don't need to rate games, but I prefer to play a whole bunch of them if time permits. ^^
Speaking of rating queues: does itch.io have system for these in the first place? Either way, to support rating games semi-evenly, I think the Jam Player I mentioned in another thread might come in handy, although it handles only Windows and web games. But also, if a game is Linux-only or Mac-only, then people who are on Windows to begin with wouldn't be able to judge these anyway. If you're interested in using Jam Player for this jam and think there are some relatively small features that could be implemented to make this jam easier, feel free to let me know. I can also gather the entries after the jam and prepare a ZIP, hopefully it won't take more than a day.
I think donations will be only visible on the game’s page, not on the submission page. I am not sure about it, can someone advice?
I mean, i have no problem with that, as long as it’s 0 or more, so to allow to play it without paying to test it during the jam.
But, as always, if the community says otherwise, please let me know.
I would wait until after the showreel.
See this post here:
https://itch.io/jam/stop-killing-games-game-jam/topic/5158271/why-cant-i-see-the...