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Rules English Sticky

A topic by Mishka created Mar 23, 2021 Views: 186 Replies: 3
Viewing posts 1 to 2

These are the characteristics for games to be portrayed on the Mystery Game Jam Showcase, you can still join the jam and work on a not showcase-able game, that’s ok.

We mostly refer to devs or projects as goups, but you can be your group of one, and that's ok; it's not mandatory to work with others.

Games should run from a browser and be uploaded to this Jam (please!).

Games should have a focus on being raceable.

Be aware of things that don't work well for a race, especially a blind race are:

- Sandboxes. A race needs a clear goal to achieve, preferably one that the game leads you to the completion of in an obvious way. Any kind of open space to play around with ideas or mechanics makes it much harder to find a clear end point, and would likely involve much of the exploration being missed anyway. 

- Timed sections or auto-scrollers. If all players will take the same amount of time to get through a part of the game, it means that it doesn't have a final impact on the result of the race. There's plenty of ways these can still be fun, but try to avoid them in this event. 

- Mazes and branching paths. Ideally, players should be racing the same content to keep things fair. Any decisions they get to make should be fully informed, and not based on guessing which direction to take, or what level might be faster or easier to complete. 

- Randomness. Like the above, each player should get a roughly even playing field. If there are elements like powerup drops, puzzle piece luck, or enemy AI can make more of an impact on how fast a player is able to complete a game than their own skill, it can feel unfun.

- Major loss of progress. Races are most exciting when they're close, and anyone can still win. Things like having to replay tens of minutes of stages, or even an entire game from the start often means a player's only hope of catching up is that their opponent has to restart as well.

- Reading, tutorials, and cutscenes. While players are trying to race, it's best for them to be in the action. Spending time trying to read to learn mechanics or story can create downtime, or time differences when players decide to read information that doesn't help, or skip critical things needed to progress. Anything important to gameplay should be explained before the game starts, or through the level design and challenges themselves.

Music, sound effects and art assets cannot be under copyright.
As per the community guidelines content cannot have messages and/or imagery of nudism, sex, drug consumption or hate towards any community and/or minority.

I was hoping to submit a Randomizer-type experience. Those get raced a lot, as the randomness is based on experience and educated pursuit of gain potential. Would such be accepted?

That should be ok...

This is the answer our guides/testers gave: 
"I'd imagine that as long as the game is up-front about this aspect and the racers can easily set their seed to be the same for the same experience, it's fine"

So yeah... try to give a way to generate a seed identical (or pretty similar) or maybe don't (?) but be clear about it.
I think ultimately it depends on you.

There are testers? Seems this is more pro than I thought.