itch.io

Hey all,

First things first, congrats to everyone who got over the finish line! Everyone at Neophyte Studios and SIUC's Digital Xpressions Lab is so thrilled to see submissions from familiar screen names and newcomers to our community alike.

Voting across our many categories ends on 2/3. The 10 various winners will be played live on stream over on twitch.tv/neophytestudios during the week of 2/6. To find out when that date is and to never miss another announcement from us, check out our Discord linked on our profile.

Good luck in the voting period and be sure to check out your fellow creators games.

p.s. The DXL judges have their own top secret voting process. If you don't end up winning in any voting categories, don't despair ;)

Hello all and welcome to the jam!

We here at Neophyte Studios and Southern Illinois University's Digital Xpressions Lab have been looking forward to hosting another game jam for quite some time. Our Narrative Game Jams provide an incredible opportunity for SIU"s creative writing graduate students to lend their workshop expertise to your submissions. We plan to stream live critique of as many of our entrants as possible over on our Twitch and you can catch all of our past Narrative Game Jam streams over on our  YouTube.

We wish you all the best of luck in the voting process and encourage every one of our creators to invite whoever they can to join the jam and participate in the voting period. We'd also like to remind all of our creators to join our Discord to stay in touch with Neophyte Studio's international audience of academics, creators, writers, and game designers!

Those that follow Neophyte Studios will be sure to see a burst of activity these coming months, so stay posted and enjoy!

-Matthew Gordon

Graduate Director - SIU's Digital Xpressions Lab

Yes! Absolutely.

I'm so sorry!! That was my fault. I forgot to change that text when I updated the page. The actual, optional theme is 'The Horizon."

Here is the link to vote on the theme!

http://www.polljunkie.com/poll/bbbecy/narrative-game-jam-4-theme

Once we have these results, we'll publish the Restriction!

I think the word inventory is a great idea! I love that. Because you can design puzzles around which words the player will have access to at any given time, at it would be relatively simple to hold progression for the player until their vocabulary builds. I also don't think you would lose a sense of exploration and immersion. I would look to "The Witness" as a prime example of what looks to me like the game you are trying to build. The Witness is a puzzle game that reuses concepts and builds on them, and it is VERY immersive!

As for the Owl comment. Owl's don't mean anything in particular to Americans. Owls are owls. A horse, though, a horse means a lot to American culture. It is a cultural icon of transport, the old west, etc. We Americans cannot really see a horse and not think about cultural heritage. The same goes for Pandas in China, or Lions in Africa. So when I was looking around for owls in Insularum Raider, I wondered if Owls were chosen because they represent something to Latin speakers, or, primarily, the culture from which Latin originates! Does that makes sense?

This game made me wish I had added a category for best music, because whatever that music was was amazing. It really, really added to the atmosphere and I felt informed the whole piece. It was very cool! Creepy. I think we need to know a bit more about the protagonist earlier on to give us a palpable tension in the narrative, though, because this game was ripe for that sort of backstory. I hope you continue with this!

This took me by surprise! It's very authentic and fascinating. It feels like you're not just playing a game, but communicating with the past, a little bit. I really enjoyed it and found it quite arresting. The prose was great, too! I would love to play another one of these games with a bit more narrative.

This game is as Charming as it is Wild. I smiled quite a bit while playing it because it felt so heartfelt in its mission to teach Latin paired with the small adventure. I found myself wondering if the owl's were iconography which I didn't understand. And I laughed quite a lot at the gang of sheep that corner you wherever you go. I think it would be very cool to have some form of UI element which helps with the Latin. A book you can read, or a puzzles that teach you the words. Something like a door which you need to say a word which means "open." You pick from some dialogue options until you learn what "Open" is in latin, and now you can reuse that concept in later puzzles. "Open." "close." And expand on it. "inside," then, "outside." etc. I think the game has a lot of potential though!

Hi! So, from my best guess (I also had to read the results multiple times.) It seems to be that Toward the Top of the category is good, while Toward the Bottom is not as good. It's showing you the average position that all the rankers put it at. So If someone voted it #1, and someone else voted it #11, it comes out to 5.5. Bear in the mind, the results are still very young, so we may yet see huge swings in the results in the coming days.

Dylan/Cathardigan here! I thought this was brilliant. I was so convinced at first that there was a bug. I was so focused on the familiar that I couldn't even see at first how strange and innovative this was. It's hilarious, beautiful, and made me smile the whole time.

Dylan/cathardigan from Neophyte here. I personally really loved the dialogue in this one. It's very prosaic and interesting. And the way the characters talked was very intriguing! I'd love to hear a soundtrack in this one because it would add so much atmosphere to it. Right now it's reminding me of Dune, and the character designs aid in that i think. Also, the protag character design is awesome. Like, build a game around that dude.

Hello game jammers! I'm not quite sure what happened, but none of us can vote on the submitted games. I am assuming it's something I did wrong when setting up the jam, so to rectify this situation, I made my own poll for everyone to go vote in!

Voting in the Jam Link: 

http://www.polljunkie.com/poll/sqocdk/narrative-game-jam-3-southern-illinois-university-neophyte-studios

Viewing the Results:

http://www.polljunkie.com/poll/ejqzyf/narrative-game-jam-3-southern-illinois-university-neophyte-studios/view

Hopefully this is a good enough band-aid fix while I figure out how to better use Itch to make game jams. Thanks for your patience and thanks so much for joining our Jam!

Hi! We at Neophyte have played the game, and we believe you might need to tweak your content warning to be a little bit more clear. The text is, at times, extremely graphic. We worry that, those sensitive to this material, aren't quite equipped to make a decision as to whether the game will trouble them.

Excellent game! I played it in the morning and a bird flew by my window, and I jumped at that. I think that's about as high praise a horror work can get!

Dylan here, I'm super impressed by this. I wanted to see how the game played as a single player game, and ended up having two open tabs playing the game on both simultaneously, and I have to say, that was a fascinating experience! I wonder what could be done with that if it were the main focus.

Dylan here, this was very cool! I like the built in conceit to restart the game. Like the uncooperative suspect is so unwieldy that you have to restart the investigation the next day. I think it could be really cool to expand on that idea when you hit restart, like a variable which could be tracked that remembers how many times you've restarted the game and gives you different answers. Probably a nightmare to program, though haha.

I submitted our most recent game jam sometime around 2/23. It was supposed to go live on 2/28. It still hasn't gone up yet on the Jam Calendar. I've had to basically take the link and share it around to our followers and discord server users so they can get to it and join it. It killed our monthly game jam this month, in essence. Kind of a bummer, because we plan to do these every single month from here on. It's impossible to maintain that consistency when we don't know if our Jam will be posted on the calendar or not.

So I'm just wondering if there's a best practices for submitting game jams that I can't seem to find? Do I need to submit as early as physically possible for every game jam? Is there some status I can attain with Itch.io's moderators, a sort of "frequent flyer" program where they can fast track these game jam posts? And we aren't some random people on the internet, we're a department at a University trying to use itch to organize game development jams to explore narrative. Surely we have a vested interest to represent ourselves, and itch.io, in the best way possible.

First of all I would like to thank every participant and every individual who took the time to cast their votes. After speaking to many of you on the official Neophyte Studios Discord I want to say that I am proud of everyone for answering our call for submissions. In our main category the voting was quite tight, therefore we have multiple runners-up for that entry as we had a 3-way tie for second place! 

This has been quite the success as far as we here at Neophyte Studios are concerned. Follow us on itch, Twitch, Youtube, or Facebook or join our Discord and keep your eyes peeled because the next (improved) iteration of the Narrative Game Jam | Sponsored by Southern Illinois University's College of Liberal Arts Digital Humanities Lab is not far off.

-Matthew Gordon

- - -

Most Compelling Narrative: 

Winner: Lila by Jilltuck

Runner-Up: A.M.I. 1.0. [K.D.H.W.] by Rinzai Gigen

Runner-Up: Sacrifices by CinemaLeo

Runner-Up: The Haunting of Rutherford Manor by ToasterStrooder

Best Use of Ludic Elements (Game Mechanics) To Deliver Story:

Winner: Sacrifices by CinemaLeo

Runner-Up: Sleepless by Thuleanx

Most Compelling Character:

Winner: Sleepless by Thuleanx

Runner-Up: Lila by Jilltuck

Most Innovative Narrative:

Winner: A.M.I. 1.0. [K.D.H.W.] by Rinzai Gigen

Runner-Up:  Sacrifices by CinemaLeo

Special Commendations:

Best VR Game:NannyCam by ren-nay

- - -

Again, thank you to all of the participants and voters and congratulations to everyone for completing the jam!

Of course! Thank you for the information.

I'll be sure to post here if I get an answer elsewhere.

I am still wondering about this question and hope to get a reply soon. 

It appears as though the game jam I created yesterday is not showing up on the jam calendar.  Does anyone know why that could be? 

Would appreciate any advice. Thanks!