A jam about exploring unseen territory of game design.
The topic was:
FAILURE IS PROGRESS
Let's mess with the concepts of winning and losing.
The jam is over and you can check out the results in the video above. :)
You. Must. Join.
- You'll challenge your creativity and expand your skill sets.
- Meet new people from the community and make new friends.
- Get and give feedback to grow as a developer. Get your game seen and played.
- For the best 25 games: A good chance to appear in a YT video on my channel.
- An additional shout-out and bragging rights if you win one of the top spots.
- For the Winner(s): Some Will You Snail launch day Steam-Keys for you and your friends. :)
Almost No Rules!
- You can work alone or in a team of any size.
- Recycling code and assets is allowed. No need to write everything from scratch.
- You can use everything you're legally allowed to use. Give appropriate credits where required. Don't use any resources you don't have the rights to!!!
- Please warn players about mature or disturbing content in your game (if there is any).
- The game you submit has to be created during the jam.
How Much Time?
The jam starts Friday, February the 26th. You'll have roughly 3 Days to make your entry. Simplicity is highly encouraged (and even one of the ranking factors) so spending just a couple of hours on your game should work as well. Go as hard or easy on it as you want.
Score Points!
Every participant will be able to rate other games on:
- Fun
- Simplicity
- Visuals
- Sound
- Creativity
- Topic
- WOWIE! (<- This is the Number 1 Ranking Factor)
JOIN US for Extra Fun!
We have an awesome creative game dev community on Discord so if you're looking for a team, technical support or feedback, this is the place to look. I want you to create something WOWIE which is why I'll hang out on Discord for the entire weekend doing my best to support you with whatever you need.
- Join our Game Dev Discord: https://discord.gg/AaCS6TP
Last time the Discord group was super active during the jam and it was a ton of fun. :)
My Winning Tips
In my experience, here is what you need to do if you want to win one of the top spots:
- Make your game easy to understand for new players. This is a super common trap a lot of game jam games fall into. Start thinking about your tutorial or how you want to teach your mechanics right from the beginning!
- Usually it's a good idea to make your game not too hard to win. People spend roughly five to fifteen minutes on each game. In most cases they won't have enough time to reach a super high level of mastery. Keep that in mind when balancing the difficulty.
- Quality over quantity. Keep your game super simple! This is even more important in this jam as simplicity is one of the main ranking factors, but even besides that, every bit of extra polish can really make your game stand out in a short jam like this.
- Take risk. The winning games are usually those who were brave enough to try something completely new and crazy (while also following the other three tips above).
Obviously there are exceptions to all rules but still, I hope it helps. :)
Resources
Note: You don't need to use any of the provided resources if you don't want to. I'm just trying my best to support you wherever I can so I've put together an asset pack with free music and sound effects you can use to speed up your process. Yes, you can also use them outside of the jam.
- WOWIE Asset Pack: https://jonas-tyroller.itch.io/wowie-pack
More Sound Resources
Here are some more useful sites you can use to get your sounds if you want:
Freesound.org: https://freesound.org Freesound.org License: https://freesound.org/help/faq/#wait-this-is-all-free
8bit Sound Generator: https://www.bfxr.net/ 8bit Sound Generator License: You have full rights to all sounds made with bfxr, and are free to use them for any purposes, commercial or otherwise.
More Awesome Resources
Colors matter quite a lot for nice visuals. I find this to be quite a useful tool: Color Scheme Generator: http://colormind.io/
Open Game Art: https://opengameart.org Open Game Art License: https://opengameart.org/content/faq#q-how-to-credit
Milestone Suggestions
You can use these rough milestone suggestions to make sure you stay on track if you want. Remember to keep it simple!
- After 5% of your time budget: You came up with multiple game ideas on paper and picked the most interesting one.
- After 25% of your time budget: You experimented with your idea a bit and the basic game loop is done.
- After 50% of your time budget: The most important visuals and sounds are implemented. Your game is fully playable.
- After 75% of your time budget: The game looks, sounds and plays even better. It might also have a short tutorial now.
- After 100% of your time budget: Final bugs are fixed, game is uploaded to a decent looking itchio page.
Good luck, have fun. :)