itch.io

For me it’s the social aspect, I could set myself a two week challenge at any time but what makes it a jam is doing it with other people. My fave jam (sadly discontinued) was small and only ran once a year, but the hosts were chatty and supportive and we saw the same faces year after year so it was lovely. Still hunting for something to replace it.

Meanwhile I joined two new jams recently. They were both hosted through Discord, which is fine. But the first one forgot to make a channel for the jam for the first few days so we were adrift in this massive spammy server, and even once the channel was set up the participants were basically left on their own. The second one the hosts were just completely silent the entire time, even when directly pinged, until the deadline when they said a quick congrats and that was that.

You don’t have to be the world’s biggest extrovert to host a jam, but give people something. Cheer on the participants, leave a heart emoji on someone’s progress screenshot, in one recent jam I encouraged the first-timers to write a daily devlog with me on the Itch forums and that was really fun. Just take an interest, basically is what I’m saying here.

Haha, thanks! You can tell this one didn’t get much time put into it, but I still learned some new bits, so all good :D

Thanks for playing! 100% agree with you on the variety, but alas life had other plans…

Had a look at your download and tbh I’ve not seen one like that before and couldn’t figure out how to play it (I’m no expert either, obviously!). I think it would be worth trying to make it playable in browser anyway as a lot more people will play it rather than download files from a stranger. If you’re not sure how to do that here’s the rough steps.

Go to Project > Export in the Godot editor, install the web profile if it’s not already there, and when it comes to naming your export file call it index.html like this:

I usually have it export to a separate builds folder just to keep things tidy, as you can see. Once that’s done you can zip up everything it exported and upload to Itch.

On the Itch game page, choose HTML from the “kind of project” dropdown and tick the playable in browser box on your upload:

Now when you view the game page it should embed and be playable right there and you can check everything works as expected.

Congrats on submitting! I’m not sure what exactly is in the zip on your game page, but as per the jam rules you’ll need either three separate exports for Win/Mac/Linux, OR a web build.

The Godot docs on exporting are here. But if you’re having trouble with any of it, just ask and I’m sure someone can help :)

Sorry to butt in but potentially important note:

With the “direct to you” option, you’re also responsible for reporting VAT on sales to the EU (this applies regardless of where you are, as long as your customer is in the EU).

So taxes / VAT in general is a whole thing to be aware of as well.

PeerTube doesn’t have much in the way of discoverability (yet) but its killer feature is the integration with the rest of the Fediverse, so people watch, share and comment on your videos from all over Mastodon etc (as long as you tag them correctly, anyway).

This does make the view numbers on PeerTube itself look small, so if you’re in it for the numbers it’s not the way to go. But it’s easy enough to upload there and use as a backup for your YT channel, if nothing else.

Cash prizes actively put me off because the best thing about a good, well-run game jam is the vibes. People of all experience levels cheering each other on and helping each other out and celebrating the small wins.

When cash enters the chat, you tend to find a lot more kids joining and spamming up the place, and a much less friendly environment overall. Plus, cash jams can grow so quickly that the organisers / moderators are overwhelmed and can’t enforce their own rules.

More participants is not always better.

Well, the jam nowhere near a full two weeks long so if you’ve misread the dates that’s maybe a slight red flag with your plan.

I came to Godot from Unity and would say learning GDScript is very easy and intuitive if you’re already a coder, but how to “think” in Godot takes a bit more time as it has quite a different way of structuring things.

That said there’s no reason you couldn’t complete something but I’d advise making it very small so the new way of doing things doesn’t completely derail you. Or, of course, just being ok with the possibility of not finishing, that’s a good way to go into a jam regardless :D

Haha, oh no I’m sorry to let you down! Maybe I will have to polish it up and release at some point, just for the sake of closure :D

After my first ever jam I got overexcited and signed up to two more that started straight after and yeah…long story short you make the right choice taking a bit of a break. It’s been great meeting you though and I’ll be following along with what you make next, for sure!

Ok first of all, 100% the creeper goose at the window was development time well spent.

Secondly, I love the style of this! Took a little while to get the hang of it in single-player mode, I definitely still need more practise, but it should be enough experience to beat my husband in multiplayer when he gets off work and can join me :D

10 / 10 made me swear so badly, my husband shouted in from the other room to see what was going on and if I was ok.

Tight little concept, well executed, I had a couple of really minor visual glitches but web exports often have things like that. Great work, and huge congrats on your first game! :D

You don’t have to believe me that I actually had a halfway decent run on the one time I fell foul of ctrl-w, but I swear it’s true!

Haha, this is frustrating as hell but in mostly the intended way. Will definitely be coming back to try again later now I have my strat down…

Yes I thoroughly enjoy taking part in jams, the learning and the creating and especially the encouraging newbies. But thoroughly hate the part where games get judged and compared and ranked, so this has actually worked out pretty well for me!

I joined the GWJ for the first time just last month and it’s a really nice supportive community, definitely won’t be doing it every month but I should have time for this anniversary one. Jams vary a lot in quality but I can definitely vouch for that one.

Well, the jam deadline has been and gone and I did not submit this game. Turns out, the game idea itself wasn’t the overly ambitious part, the “spending two weeks making a game without something major interrupting” was the overly ambitious part. So we had a real life thing come up at the weekend and I had to abandon my dreams of glory. Such is life!

My goals for this jam were to:

a) Learn more about rigging and animating in Blender without it feeling so precarious like it’s all about to stop working if I press a single key wrong.

b) Learn about navigation agents in Godot in a small self-contained project without two years of legacy spaghetti making it more complicated.

Both of these were a massive success, and I’ll be using all this new knowledge in my main city builder project. Hooray!

As a bonus I also learned an important optimisation technique for particle systems in web exports, and generally got to practise my low poly modelling. And of course, I learned a lot about the differences between ducks and geese.

I’d love to say I’ll finish the game anyway and update this post with a link, but we all know that probably won’t happen. Still, after a week or so break I’ll hopefully be ready to take part in the anniversary edition of the Godot Wild Jam, so if anyone wants to join me for that one feel free :D

Congrats to everyone who actually did submit, special shoutouts to obscure gods and Brandon Saiz for joining my devlog initiative, and I’m off to play your games now!

Oh wow that is often! Well, I’ll try my best :D

This is such a great idea for a jam, I’ve been sending it to all my aspiring pixel artist friends. I couldn’t participate this time but would love to in future if the timings work out, do you have a rough idea how often you want to run them?

Apparently I never commented on this amazing game over screen despite looking at this thread multiple times, and I think it’s because every time I just STARE at how horrifically creepy it is. In the most complimentary way, of course!

We can all breathe a bit easier with the teasers done now I think, good luck on the todo list :D

Great work! Your bubble spawn system is almost exactly the same as what I’m doing for my birds at the start of each level (I needed more control than just having them spawn randomly), so great minds think alike I guess.

It really is so satisfying when you get to that point and can think through a problem and come up with your own plan to solve it, it’s a big milestone as a programmer so seriously congrats.

Whew, yesterday was stressful for all of us jammers I think! But at the last second, the organisers came in clutch and decided to extend the deadline for the teaser videos, which was very handy as I’d thought it worked out as 11pm UK time but it was actually 9pm so I was in a slight rush for a minute there 😅

Still, happy with what I managed to cobble together within the time limit especially since I was feeling pretty under the weather yesterday too. (I did not have time to balance the audio so be ready on your volume settings if it’s too loud, sorry)

I’m not saying I’ll make teasers for all my jam entries in future, that would be madness. But the planning part definitely helped me polish some bits up much earlier than I usually would, and I think that’s been really helpful, so maybe I’ll adopt that part in future projects and just make the actual video in my head!

Anyway.

Plans for the weekend basically involve making all the missing kinds of birds, adding sfx to the game instead of just to the trailer (movie magic, baby!), and figuring out why sometimes some kinds of ducks stand on the water instead of swimming in it despite sharing their code with all the other ducks that work fine 🤷‍♀️

Siiiigh.

Relatable

Yay, welcome aboard!

Keeping it simple was definitely a good approach, I think that’s where a lot of first time jammers get into trouble but there’s plenty to learn by completing even a very small game from start to finish. And the art is looking great so far!

Note to self: remember to make a title screen…

41 here, idk why this jam is skewing older than most but I’m definitely here for it :D

Also just to add to the peer pressure (again): Devlog devlog devlog!

Thanks! Never too late to join us, it’s very nice to look back and have a record of your progress :)

Thank you! But sad to report I did fix the bird issue ;)

It is ONE DAY until teaser videos are due and I still don’t really have a game as such. Through the power of video editing though, maybe I can make it look like I do.

To that end, I made a quick list of what I’d like to record for the video and therefore what things really needed to be polished up before then versus what can wait until after that deadline. This is an interesting approach because usually my problem is I get bogged down in building systems and only remember it has to look like a game on the last day of a jam.

So I made some basic UI icons to replace the placeholders! They’re still kind of placeholder but better than nowt.

And then, instead of continuing a triumphant list of easy wins, I got stuck trying to get an outline shader to work and got myself in a right mess.

Thankfully Fedi came to the rescue, as they always do, and put me on the right track. So after a tiny amount of skiving off work this morning I also have outlines!

Also made a quick animation for the ducks if you try and falsely accuse them of actually being geese.

Small steps, but if you take enough of those you end up getting where you need to go.

Tonight is our fantasy football draft, so not much if any free time, but I’ll hopefully be able to squeeze in a bit of devving tomorrow afternoon / early evening and grab everything I need for the video submission at 11pm (UK time).

Then, you know, actually turn it into a game over the weekend maybe? 😅

Just a quick update from the rest of the long weekend as we mostly used it to lounge around, attempt surgery on a dying houseplant, watch all the Resident Evil films back to back for some reason, and then stay up for Monsterdon on Sunday which didn’t even start until 2am UK time.

I did a lot of behind the scenes stuff to turn what I already have into an actually working (if extremely basic) game loop, which included various backend things you can’t see but also a placeholder UI with goose count and birdwatching reputation bar.

And a notebook, although this is a 3d scene and as I went to take this screenshot a bird wandered through it so I’ll have to make sure they stop moving when the notebook is open, whoops! First time that’s happened, maybe I’d never have noticed the issue if not for taking screenies for these devlogs. Thanks, one person who reads these devlogs!

Most of the rest of my time was bugfixing but also still trying to figure out animations in Blender. Why do they sometimes get duplicated, or even eaten? What is a timeline vs an action editor vs an NLA editor? And if I accidentally hit tab, how do I get my keyframes back so I don’t have to keep making backup files to revert to?!* Yesterday was a frustrating day, can you tell? 😅

Anyway. Onwards and birdwards!

* I did figure this part out, at least

That’s the game jam spirit :D

Wow this is really coming together fast! The hassle of getting the weird neck (mostly) working was definitely worth it, that thing is a nightmare…in a good way.

It made me laugh out loud the first time I saw it working and honestly, what more can you ask from your own jam project :D

Last night I managed to get the duck waddling, although it seems it has a slight limp so I’ll have to revisit this animation later. It took hours, and I feel like every time I try and learn animation in Blender I end up doing it a different way and still have no idea what’s “right”. Still, it works.

After that I also added an idle animation, which took all of about 30 seconds so no idea why I didn’t start with that one. Combine the animations with the fact that ducks no longer fall through the floor? Success!

So onto the geese! For now, my goose model is just the duck model reskinned. But fear not, bird people, I do know there are plenty of differences and am just being lazy for prototying purposes.

The point of the game is to identify the geese hiding out among the ducks. Which is a cliche interpretation of the theme and probably one in a large lineup of similar entries but anyway. When you successfully identify a shifty goose, I thought it might be fun for it to freeze, look at you for a moment, then disappear in a puff of smoke. So here’s a first draft of that (ignore the stupid cursor in the way).

Really not sure how much I’ll get done today, we’re staying home all day so that should mean a lot of dev time but I could also really do with a rest and probably a nap. So we’ll see how that goes, I guess.

(PSA: If you are taking part in the jam but gave up on the Discord because of no dedicated channel, we do have one now, come share your progress too!)

Haha, phew!

Oh my god you had me at eldritch, I am so in. Glory to the Ghooth!

Completely forgot what sort of game you’d said you were making until the very last line, haha, this is going to be an interesting mashup :D

Since we don’t have a jam-specific space on the Discord (edit: we do now, hooray!), I thought it’d be fun to keep a record of my futile efforts here instead. There’s a real chance this game won’t be finished on time, but succeed or fail I’ll admit it here :D

So, when the theme was announced I was thoroughly confused because I’m not from the US. But if I’ve never heard of the kids’ game, I have heard of both ducks and geese and birds in general. And I recently played someone else’s very fun jam entry that involved watching through a security camera so….yoink! Watching birds (cubes) through binoculars it is.

For some reason I’ve gone 3d with this game, which…I can kind of do 3d but am completely lost when it comes to rigging and animations and this is the biggest risk to not finishing. But it’s something I need to get better at for my actual main game project, so what better place to practise than a jam.

There have admittedly been some issues.

And don’t even get me started on trying to rig a duck.

But maybe, just maybe, we’ll get there in the end. Watch this space!

Oh boooo! It works on mine, but I’ll have to try and test on others next time to make sure. Sorry :(

Happens to the best of us! Maybe you can fix it after the rating week is up so we can play anyway :)

I think it was that one, yeah! Not that I was complaining by that point lol

I love these kinds of games, really great job here! The art style is nice and the different abilities make it just challenging enough for my early morning brain.

The tutorial could probably be improved, I had to trial and error things like “where exactly do the signs need to be placed to work as expected?” and “what direction will a critter be travelling after it teleports?” and things like that. But not a major issue, it was quick enough to test and figure out the answers.

Another entry that I would totally play a full-length version of!

Thank you! Completely agree with your feedback, I was learning all about clickers from scratch this week and had plenty of ideas for how to improve and balance it, but you know how that goes towards the end of a jam. Already working on the new improved version to upload once the rating is all done :D

We’ve all been there! :D