This jam is now over. It ran from 2022-04-30 22:00:00 to 2022-05-14 22:00:00. View results

The Tool Jam 2 is over. Congratulations and thanks to all the participants !

The winner is TileTex by MikleTuapse, a tool to create textures from photos.

See you next year...

This Jam is about creating a tool.

It can be a spreadsheet application, a painting tool, an animation maker, a music sequencer, a word processor, a bad idea generator, a game engine, a palette mixer, a fantasy console, a new programming language, an .png to .wav file converter, a spelling mistake generator, an MS Paint clone, or anything else.

  • Low-effort buggy tools that you develop in 30 minutes are welcome.
  • Ultra classy, customizable and full of features tools are welcome.

  • Your entry must be a tool.
  • You can start working on the project before the jam starts or finalize an old project for the jam.
  • But you can't submit a project that was already published on itch.io before the jam.

Apart from that pretty much everything is allowed: anyone can enter, working in a team is allowed, submitting multiple entries or submitting an entry to other jams is allowed, using pre-existing assets or code, working with any game engine/language/tool, it's all ok.

The theme is: This tool has some serious limitations.

Think of an obvious and easy-to-implement feature that you might not implement by choice. For example, a drawing tool without an eraser. Think of a constraint that you would implement on purpose to create a unique experience. For example a text editor where the text gets deleted if you stop typing. Think of a random color picker that can only pick from two colors.

Think of this quote from Nathalie Lawhead: "In all of this, the arbitrary limitation part is key. It's so weird to say that, but the fact that any of these tools have such strict limitations is (like I keep saying) what makes them so creatively liberating." (source: this blog post)

Don't forget: this theme is totally optional, you can take it literally, interpret it as you want or not use it at all.

Tools will be rated by anyone based on three criteria:

  • How nice or fun it is to use.
  • How much I could potentially use it in the future.
  • How innovative or original it is.

Last Tool Jam:

It was one year ago, The Tool Jam 1 (Winner: L.I.N.K).

Questions?

If you have questions, please use the community section.

Discord?

Here is the discord server !!

Credits:

1-Bit Icons: (I and II) by VECTORPIXELSTAR.
Font: Mister Pixel by Christophe Badani (VTF)
Palette: The Diplomacy Palette by Griim