Welcome to the fourth game jam I'm doing courtesy of game-wisdom. For each one, I'm challenging developers to create interesting and unique video games and to hopefully inspire them to create something more in the future. If you have any suggestions or comments about the jam afterwards, please let me know.

Rules  

• teams should be no more than five people and you are free to organize on the Game-Wisdom discord.
• All game jam games must be submitted via Itch, I will not accept email links to Google Drive or dropbox.
• Prototypes can be as short as you want, but a prototype should require no more than 30 minutes of playtime. While judging, if a game does exceed the 30-minute time limit, nothing past that mark will count for the game's rating.
• For the sake of showing these off on stream, please keep things SFW.
• You are free to use premade or store assets provided you have the license for them, and no AI-generated games.
• All prototypes must be made during the jam itself, you are not allowed to turn in an already-created game/prototype, or an entry that you used in a pre-existing or currently running jam.
• If you don't follow the rules, your entry will be disqualified from judging.

If a game cannot be played at all due to browser issues, or files are being flagged by basic antivirus software before running, those entries will be disqualified. If your game has a problem during judging, you will be given a chance to fix it.

Theme:

In honor of me finally finishing my book on RTS design and spending the last two months playing nothing but games managing lots of little guys running around and not following orders. The theme for this game jam is: 

Managing Mismanagement 

Judging Criteria:

Originality -- How original was the gameplay

• 1 - The game played like everything we've seen before 
• 5 - completely new gameplay for the respective genre

Gameplay -- How good was the overall experience to play?

• 1 - not enjoyable to play
• 5 - smiling ear-to-ear while playing

Performance-- Options menu, controls, UI/UX etc.

• 1 - The game is barely functional, if at all
• 5 - has full options, no bugs, slowdown, etc.

Aesthetics -- The look and feel of the game.

• 1 - It looks like someone just pasted asset packs into an engine and called it a day
• 5 - The art goes with the theme and gameplay perfectly

The Theme -- Does the game meet the theme of the jam and how clear was it?

• 1 - No idea how this game meets the theme
• 5 - The theme is front and centered and easily seen

Completion -- Is there a full concept and beginning, middle, and end to the prototype?

• 1 - The submission is over before it starts showing any real gameplay
• 5 - The prototype shows off the theme, explores gameplay with it, and has a conclusion

Judging will be done by the guest judges and myself, and I will stream my play of the submissions after they're done. This will only be done if there are more than 3 credible submissions, if we don't get it, there won't be a stream, but there will be a winner announced from the event. All jam prototypes and concepts will belong to their creators, with all review content and streams owned by myself.