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We've reached out!

Congratulations on taking second place in the jam! Please respond with a good email to get in touch so we can give you your prize. Thanks

Congratulations on taking 3rd place! Please respond with a good email to get in contact so we can get you your prize. Thanks!

Congratulations on winning the jam! Please provide a good email to use to get in touch to distribute your prize.

Congratulations to the top 3 winners of the game jam and recipients of our prizes!

1st Place ($300 + Internship Opportunity)  - The Dreaded Groves by Gizmordo

2nd Place ($100) - SkyHy: LightBreak by metalzone84

3rd Place ($100) - Don't Stop by NicheAbyss

Winners please check your inboxes for our message!

Thank you for joining the jam and congratulations for those that submitted a game! Congratulations to the Community Voted winners! The HYTOPIA team is currently reviewing the entries and will announce the winners for the prizes once complete.

Horror, darkness, monsters - or maybe the fear of not turning in your homework! The interpretation is totally up to you!

Welcome! If you have any questions about the jam, feel free to comment here. 

If you have any questions related to the HYTOPIA SDK, join the discord. There are many friendly and knowledgeable devs and HYTOPIA team members ready to help!

We have added a 24-hour grace period to give ample time for submission. Good luck!

Just to be clear for everyone, the use of third party assets is allowed in this jam :)

Hi there, you don't have a web build for this game - so unfortunately it is disqualified.

-- this game is ineligible for prizes, but we've left it in the jam at the developer's request - export issues prevented it from working on web --

Hi there, your game doesn't have a web version - this jam requires a web build to be eligible for prizes.

This page is private - let me know when you've published it properly and I'll requalify the game :) 

Submissions to this jam must be playable on web.

Submissions to the jam must be available for free.

It has already been disqualified, yes

That's fine, it's just not eligible to enter this jam

We require a web build for this jam. It also needs to be an arcade game with a high score table, it needs to adhere to the theme "one shot", and you need to have started development when the jam started, not 11 days before

Hello! I wrote a blog post about the cool new tech we can expect to see from Unity in the coming years: https://itch.io/blog/804083/unite-2024-the-future-of-unity

Unity 6 is about to be released, but the tech preview has been out for ages. I'm interested in the cutting edge stuff coming in Unity 7 (not that they've confirmed the name yet)

This is a great little party game, get a couple of friends together and get real angry with them for blowing you up. For people without friends there are also bots, which give a decent amount of challenge. There are a couple of game modes, a few maps, the music is pretty great and the game looks nice. All in all, a nice little package considering it's free! Fair warn, though, you do have to sign up. Supports social sign in, but might be a deal-breaker for you.

https://bloodvortex.itch.io/astro-lance

We're making a free suite of online tools for games, focused around cross-platform social interactions. To start with, we've got user sign-up (including google/apple/discord/twitter account linking), a leaderboard system that is a little bit more resistant to posting fake scores, and a quick and easy JSON database store. User sign up is optional for interacting with the leaderboard and database, it's possible to programatically create a "guest user" that can use all the services without forcing sign-in. You get a random username, and can create an account to pick a specific username and take your scores & data to different devices!

We're hard at work on a friend system, too. Ideally it would be really simple to post messages, challenge your friends to beat high scores, send game state - e.g. a seed in a roguelike game so your friends can jump straight in to the same game state, that sort of thing. 

Are there any extra features you'd like to see from this sort of thing? The idea is that we handle all the infrastructure and you make cool games. What's on your wishlist, something where you think "I would love to add that to my game, but I'm not paying for hosting" 😉

Arcade games are our jam (get it) and we want to see a bunch more of them - so we're putting up $10,000 worth of prizes split across a few different categories. Our last jam spawned some awesome games, but we want more. 

We've got a pretty active Discord community if you need help, or want to find a team. I personally run a weekly live game feedback session there too, if you have an existing project and you want to see someone new play it live.

Now, you're probably thinking "hey, where is this money coming from" - we have a WIP suite of free developer tools, and candidly we want more people to be aware of them. But it's not just that! We want to foster a cool game dev community with regular game jams and feedback sessions. In my opinion, the best way for us to make a great set of useful tools is to have an active community: using our tools or not, developers are our priority and we want to see and help you do cool things!

You're also probably thinking "this is definitely a scam", but no! The last winners were paid within 10 days of the jam end, and it's really easy to get in touch with us if you're having problems. This is our fourth jam that has a prize pool, and all winners have been paid 😉

https://itch.io/jam/hyplay-jam-2

The spinning mechanic is really fun actually, there's a really good amount of risk/reward there. Almost every time I died, it was because I tried to spin just one more time! On that mechanic, though, I'd like to see a bit of inertia on the spin, so you don't stop immediately. I think that would make it feel better, and it would be riskier to keep spinning and build up your spin momentum. I don't understand why I could spin on the ground, and it felt weird to land at an angle and continue "running" at an angle, that's a bug with your main mechanic that I would consider fixing quickly.

On that - spinning is clearly the main mechanic, so why is the combination stuff there? It doesn't feel like it serves the gameplay, it kinda feels shoehorned in - as if you had to do that, and I can't quite work out why. If I were you, I would strongly consider removing that mechanic entirely. At least make a prototype without it, and see if it significantly changes the feel of the game!

I won't comment much on visual style, because it is clearly a mechanics-focused prototype, but I will say that you need to consider your use of colour. Your game is oversaturated, if I were you I'd stick to existing palettes - check https://lospec.com/palette-list 🙂

You might be interested in the live feedback events we run on our discord server - every Thursday at 19:00 UTC/12:00 PT - that's today, in a few hours! 

There were a few bugs. I'll quickly list them here in case there were any you aren't aware of:

• the game freezes for a few seconds after you die, before the game over screen comes up - not sure why this is, but it feels bad!
• Collecting one of the squares in the sky resets your jump, so you can actually jump infinitely - though it seems like your jump adds to your vertical velocity, so if you're falling it only slows you down a little. 
  • Side note, that's not really how game jumps usually work 😉
• I can spin while on the ground, and my rotation isn't ever reset, both of which feel weird
• You've got the typical endless runner prototype issue of not being able to react in time to certain obstacles. Generally to solve that you can do a few things:
  • check the player's height and vertical velocity when you spawn an object, and make decisions about what to spawn based on that. E.g. if they are low and moving up, don't spawn something high
  • give the player more warning - kinda like tetris does with block previews, you can indicate whether the next block is going high or low
• don't know where to put this, but I never have any idea what the pieces do. Gun to my head I'd say 95% of them do nothing 🙃

The macOS version works, I think. I clicked the light and everything went dark, and I couldn't figure out what to do from there! Sorry 😅 

https://gyazo.com/cd31e34a5e41a367fde2579e9de81f7c

Hello! I recently gave a short talk about prototyping, and I thought I'd turn it into a blog post so everyone gets access to my sage wisdom/incoherent ramblings. Read it here: https://itch.io/blog/767822/the-art-of-the-prototype and let me know what you think!

I really enjoyed this! There's a lot of content, and the autobattling system is pretty satisfying.

I haven't actually played anything like this before so maybe take this with a pinch of salt, but I have some feedback :)

• there's a LOT of information here, and the vast majority of it is displayed with text. It's a lot to take in, particularly for new players. I can't really offer many solutions here, but it's something to consider!
• the art style is super inconsistent. There's pixel art mixed with vector art, and it's not even consistent with where each one is used. A lot of the art is genuinely gorgeous, but is most of it asset packs? It certainly feels like most of it is asset packs - and that's because of the inconsistency. 
• I'd like to see some sort of cloud save system so I can switch between devices. This is something I can see myself playing on my phone for a bit on a long journey, then loading up in a browser on my laptop when I get home!
• took me a few attempts to realise that when I was clicking things to level up, I was only changing distribution not the skill points themselves. That's a little bit of user error, but there's a disconnect there that I think is wholly unnecessary. It's more satisfying to click the thing and have number go up, rather than click around a bit to set the distribution and have things go up automatically.
• menus need juice! I want things to jiggle when I click them 😂 in Unity that sort of thing is really easy

Overall, it's a really solid loop you've got here. I'm really impressed! Looking forward to seeing more 😁

The game type can be anything :)

Great question! Hardcore gamer target with KBM as the input is totally fine! We are looking for fun games that run in the browser exactly as you mentioned!

You got banned from our Discord?

Great question, anytime before June 5th :)

Excited for you to grow your portfolio and skills!

Would love to have you post some of your work in our official Discord community talent forum as well :)

Join here: https://discord.gg/hyplay