itch.io

Only those that seek to monetize their games will need the CC, regular jam entrants are exempt.

While this is a little bit of a grey area, we will err on the side of caution and encourage people to stick with actual deer or beings that directly resemble deer.  Once hybrids get involved it can be easy to move fairly far away from the original animal motif by sticking antlers on a completely different animal.   That said, any creature in the cervidae family, or resembling a creature in the cervidae family, should be fine.  Some allowances may be had; say for things like robotic deer, or mythical beings that are directly based on a deer design but jackalopes, like Fatigue, are unique creatures unto themselves.  That said, hybrids are still welcome to play a role in the story!  So long as there is at least one deer present.

Cervidae Family: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cervids

We want to keep the jam casual and fun, with less emphasis on competition and more emphasis on the  creative works being displayed, so the voting will likely be a fairly casual process when compared to typical vote casting. 

A lot of this jam is about building a community of creators who want to work with each other and help each other shine, so we are considering asking creators to post their top pick for the "best theme implementation" in a dedicated community tab at the end of December--perhaps with a few words as to why they think that game deserves the top pick.  We want to encourage creators to play each other's games and share the aspects that they enjoyed about those games.

We will create a dedicated tab with a short list of rules and qualifications  for voting, after the Jam ends.  The top voted game will also receive a shout out on the jam page along with the favourite picks from each of our Novembuck Jam team members (Loudo, JamieDerg, Cheetah, Myself and perhaps a few surprise guests--but more on them later!)

Sprites will be revealed soon.  Cheetah and I are each doing our own sprite packs for the jam and are doing a bit of a game jam crunch, to be sure they'll be ready for folks to use.   There should be a good variety of characters for people to choose from, but if you want a little sneak peak at what we are cooking, we have a decent herd of deer, and at least a bear (or two)!

Sprites are under a CC BY-SA – (Creative Commons Attribution + ShareAlike) license.  They may be used for this Novembuck 2025 jam or any works directly related to this jam.  You are welcome to monetize the project so long as the correct attributions are made: one for the artist(s) whose work you are using, and one for the "Novembuck 2025" game jam itself.  Such attributions should appear on the itch.io page of the game and  in the game credits proper--if credits are present.

For an easy template to copy: "Credit to the Novembuck 2025 Game Jam  for use of their assets in this game.  Credit to (Cheetah/Camazule) for use of their (Art/Music)."

Cheetah and I have also been hard at work on the sprites and music, so if you do use them in a monetized Novembuck 2025 game, we would always appreciate a few bucks ;) being dropped our way!

Once a jam is submitted, it can be modified any time BEFORE the end date of the jam.  Once the end date hits, the submission cannot be touched for the next month, to give us and the community a chance to look at and play through the games.  That means any mistakes not fixed before the final jam day must remain in the game until the end of December.  Then, you are free to update.  It is part of the challenge of the jam, and we keep the rule in place so that games don't continue to update and change after the Jam closes.  Giving everyone an equal opportunity to show off what they can accomplish in a month.

LOVE the music on this one!  Absolutely great and I can't wait to download it and play it on loop.

I'll look into exporting flac and wav for folks who prefer those formats.  Ogg will likely offer the smallest file size with loops, but I can definitely make some other file types available for folks who prefer that!

They'll all be uploaded and available for the start of the jam.  File format will be .ogg and all songs will be designed to loop.

It depends how many I manage to complete before the start date for the game jam, but I am hoping to to provide a full album's worth of music all in a similar style but hopefully with a variety of moods and tones.  I already have a few songs done.