I’ll try to be briefer on this part x3
I agree with most of what you said here, including your point on games using free assets being judged separately from games using original content, and this is something others have brought up to those in charge of the jam. However, those in charge stated that they can’t/won’t do that because they don’t have the capacity to make it work or something >.<
And I also have to point out that in this particular jam, participants are actively encouraged to form teams. Some of the participants are teams that already exist and are already working together to make commercial games, but the vast majority of spooktober participants are merely individuals that are part of the DevTalk community on Discord.
I tend to do what most others do and look for people to team up with from within the community. This year especially, there was an abundance of different people hoping to form and join teams in all different kinds of roles, so anyone using free assets made a conscious choice to do so for whatever reason. Some even said that they prefer to work solo because they can’t handle the people drama of teams, or they simply don’t have the time to communicate effectively or function as part of a team, and so decided to participate alone and use creative commons assets to fill the gaps in their skillsets.
DevTalk even make a big thing of getting people together for the jams that they run by holding live team recruitment events on their Discord server.
I do think your suggestion of 2 separate categories would be the best way to go about things, but stuff like that has been suggested by other devs in the past directly to the jam organisers and has been shot down for one reason or another >.<
I would dearly like to hope that corruption isn’t present when the folks running the competition are generally respected within the VNdev community, but at the same time, I wouldn’t entirely rule out the possibility when, as you say, the influence of money is a corrupting factor >.< I’ve heard certain rumours here and there over the years, but I try my best not to believe things like that without hard evidence. I’d also like to hope that sponsors would look into stuff like that before handing over cash, especially since some of them are publishers of games.