itch.io

Hi! We totally didn't forget about this until like 20 minutes ago... We are currently setting up the final things and will be putting the link on the page in a few minutes! Sorry for the delay!

Hi There!

As long as you follow the theme and rules of both jams, you should be fine rulewise!
Keep in mind that I am not sure if you can submit one game to multiple jams, so keep some extra time to try that out and create an extra game page if needed..

Hi there!
Like the other user also said, there is an option to add other people to your game as creators.
I'm a little foggy on this (it has been a while), but I think you add them like this:
- Go to your game page from your personal itch dashboard

- Go to the admins section (might be under the other settings, not sure)

- Add your friends as an admin, by adding their itch link

They will get an email to confirm, or you get a link that you can send to them. If they are registered as an admin, you can also have them show as contributor to the game for both the jam and on the game page. This includes voting rights for the jam.

Hi there!

The link is now available on the jam page! :)

Hi there!

I have checked the logs and ban list and confirmed your story. 

Some time after your ban we had a big issue with the bot, which means that bans issued before then don't automatically expire anymore.

I have now manually lifted your ban, so you are free to join back! 

Hi there!

You are free to use any engine or framework you have access to, but keep in mind that most people only play games with a webGL build on their itch page. If a player needs to go to an external source or through a lot of effort (maybe even with very specific programs to open the files), it's likely they won't play and rate your game. 

Hi there! 

As the other person also said: short games are completely fine!
It is actually recommended to create games that are on the shorter side (5-10 minutes max to experience all content), for a few reasons:

1. People rating your game won't be playing the game for hours and hours. If your game has hours of content, the players rating your game won't experience all content  which might influence your rating (negatively!).

2. Scope issues... The jam is only a week long, so planning a super long game might result in not being able to do everything in a polished and nice way, which would also negatively influence your ratings. 

Jams are a learning experience, where you are free to go out of your comfort zone and try to finish a small project. If that small project is a 2 minute long game, that is still an achievement because you finished something!

Hi there! 

If you use Discord, you can reach me at TheDutchMagikarp#0006 :)

Hi there!
During the rating period (after the submission deadline), new uploads are locked. This means that you can NOT upload any new platforms or updates after the submission deadline. Of course this is unlocked after the rating period ends!

To make sure you have all builds playable and ready on your page, factor in at least an hour to get your submission page ready and submitted!

Hi there!

We would like to ask you to make the majority of the game during the jam. 
You can use pre-made assets, but please don't just submit a game that you made before the jam started. It wouldn't be fair to other participants if you spent a total of 4 weeks on your submission while everyone else only gets one :)

Hey there!
Sorry to hear that, sadly we can't keep everything in mind while planning the jam. Maybe you can still create a small project in the hours outside of school and during the weekend?
If not, let's hope you can join the first jam of 2022!

Hi there!

You can create any type of game you want!

Hi there!

Sadly there is no way to suggest themes. A week before the jam starts there will be a link to vote for a theme out of a list we picked ourselves. The winner of this vote will be announced as the jam theme at the starting time!

Hey there!
Yes you are free to use any software you have the license for!
Make sure that you are able to export your game to a working windows build and/or webGL to increase the amount of people playing your game!

Hi all!
There are a lot of topics on this community forum and sometimes people use it to ask questions about the rules or organisation of the jam. This means a couple of things:

1. We might miss questions which means people get no or wrong answers.
2. Questions are going to be asked more often because nobody is going to go through all of the topics just in case someone asked the same thing before.

To prevent these, this sticky topic can be used to ask questions about the rules and organisation of the jam.

This post is not to ask your technical or programming related questions! Only use this if something is unclear in the rules or if you are not sure if something is allowed!

Hi there!

The rules of the gamejam state the following:

part from that you are allowed to use any game engine or framework, you can also use assets not made by you, but make sure you have the proper license to use them and crediting is of course encouraged! Making everything from scratch is not mandatory, but if you do you get to be extra proud of yourself at the end

This means that using pre-made assets is allowed. What the other user also said, it might take away from your jam experience to prepare assets in advance. It's also going to be hard to create your sprites etc. in advance, as you don't know the theme yet. I hope I answered your questions, let me know if you have any more!

Hi, please send ~Admin mail a message. We can help you there.

Hey, thanks for playing!

This has been implemented for the next update!

There is currently just over 30 items in the game, which includes the 5 base ones. I have put in a counter to indicate how many you have unlocked out of the total for the next version!

Good to hear!

Hey there, thanks for playing!

The game pausing itself while on the background was a bug I thought I had fixed earlier, but someone notified me of the issue just after publishing the game... It will be fixed in the update that will come out in a few days!

The placing of already discovered items their recipe is already in the game! Right clicking should do exactly this! Seeing that I have a mobile version in mind too, I might change this in the future to support getting dragged into the output slot. Thanks for the idea!

Hey, thanks for playing the game!

The current game is currently still in very early stages, so I'm not sure if there will be a guide-like thing yet. I think part of the fun is to figure them out for yourself, but I can also imagine there being a way to "cheat" a little with the recipes later on.

Thanks for the comment, I appreciate it!

With some help from a friend on Discord, I found the solution!
For some reason the changes to the file system were flushed to the IndexedDB right away in my test project, while that wasn't the case in my main project. 

I read this link multiple times on my search, but always discarded it as not being the solution.

It was the solution.

All I had to do was adding 

    [DllImport("__Internal")]
    private static extern void JS_FileSystem_Sync();

to my code and then calling JS_FileSystem_Sync() after finishing up the writing.


I'm gonna leave this topic up in case someone ever runs into the same problem.
If a moderator decides that it's better to delete the post, feel free.
You can also lock it if you want, I won't be needing further assistance here.

Hi there!
I'm currently developing my game (with Unity) and for easy testing I am creating webGL builds to put on my page.
Between sessions, I need to store the audio settings and highscore of the player. I used to do this with playerprefs.
Playerprefs broke between different builds, which is far from optimal,  so I went to find a solution. On google, I found this old post.

The post explains why playerprefs doesn't work between builds, which is understandable. I created a small test project in which I save a value with the workaround provided by Beck and it worked! I was happy and started to rewrite the code for my main project.

Now when testing my main project, it doesn't work anymore?!

I won't ask for support with my code, because obviously that's not the goal here, but I am looking for solutions.
Is there a way to save data between Unity webGL sessions and build versions on itch?

Hey! No we won't shorten the rating period.

First of all it would be weird to say "You have this much time to rate" and then just shorten it by half.
Secondly, not everyone has time during the same days. There are also people that have full time jobs during the week and are too tired to play games after they come home. They can use the weekend coming up, for example.

If you deleted the download, there was no way for anyone to play your game. To make sure it doesn't show up in the "needs ratings" list, your game was removed from the jam.

No.

Hey I'm gonna give some perspective from the organisers side here.

So first of all, this jam has an insane amount of participants compared to our other jams. Our other jams were also big, but this jam has about 3(!) times the participant count of the previous jam. The submission count didn't grow as much, but still over doubled compared to the last time.
This means there are a lot of new problems surfacing. For example, the dedicated jam channel on the server has been pure link spam for the first day or two. In the past, we didn't have to do any kind of separation for promotion of games and discussion, while it was definitely required this time. Is that just because of the increased amount of participants? Or maybe the mindset of the participants? No clue, we don't have a way to find out either.
On the Discord server, we are easily able to solve this. We are familiar with the moderation tools and able to customize quite a bit. We have our own bot and if it's really needed, we can make the bot help us with keeping the channels clean and orderly. 

The itch.io community tab is an entirely different beast. I think I can speak for all organisers here when I say that we have almost no experience using them and that's not even talking about the moderation features. Learning to use a new set of moderation tools while everything is already a giant mess (yes I admit, the community tab is currently a disaster) is a bit of pressure and takes time. It's currently summer break for most of the staff members so some have trips planned, volunteering work, or other activities during the day. For me, after working on the jam for a week, energy levels are definitely low and not really being recharged with the heatwave going on. This also has it's effect on how we are moderating the community tab, for example. 

Personally, I don't have a problem with rate 4 rate being a thing. I think it's good to encourage people to play eachothers games and give feedback. I do agree with the concerns you bring up regarding people just rating 1 star without even downloading/launching the game, just to comment "good game rate mine too thanks".

(This next bit is what I believe to be true, but if Leafo is reading this he can maybe give a little better explanation as he knows how it works behind the scenes..)
The itch rating system has a weighted rating, which means that the ratings of people that just spam 1 star on everyone will be counted less than the rating of a person that gives honest ratings to everyone. This should at least take care of part of this problem.

There is still the problem of people just commenting on games saying "nice game". There is no way for us to block this kind of behaviour. There are too many ratings and comments coming in on a daily basis to moderate all of them. There is also no way for us to know when the comment is a genuine one. Maybe the person commenting really thought it was the best game they ever played and they don't have any criticism, maybe it's just a rate farming spammer. Of course we can check the history of the user, but that's another action we would have to take per rating, consuming more of our already limited time...

Then there is the rating queue idea. GMTK jam had a rating queue where you first had to play x amount of games from your queue, before you were able to rate anyone. This is something we also wanted to do for our jam, but I think something went wrong in the backend of itch (it's not a released feature yet, we had contact with itch to see if they could set it up for us and it should've been set up correctly). We don't want to keep people locked to their queue completely, because I know that I want to rate the games from my friends freely. If I would have to find them by pure luck... That would be a disaster! It would of course help with people like Dani getting insane amounts of ratings, just because they are a content creator. I have considered talking to him to see if he would be ok with not being able to win because it's not fair with his community behind him, but at the same time it's not fair to do that either! If he does win in all categories (or any category), we'll see how we can handle it. Especially because there are no prizes on the line, it's a lot easier to just also mention the 2nd place games too.

I am definitely going to bring up some points about the community tab (and post-jam community in general) in the post-jam organisers reflection chat, so we can hopefully make the experience a better one next time. I will also discuss if we should block the rate 4 rate threads completely and start cracking down on them more during this jam, or if we see another solution.

I think I have talked about the most important issues brought up in here, let me know if I missed any.

TL;DR: We don't know how itch community works, time is valuable and limited, we are going to reflect on the current state of the rating period and hopefully improve for next time.

I think the other mods do read the posts sometimes, but I'm not 100% sure of it.

No. During the rating period (now), new file uploads are locked. This means you can't upload ANY new files, including webGL.

After the rating period is over, you can of course upload new files like a webGL build.

I can confirm there are no anti cheat tools.

Hey!
Yes sorry about that. I guess none of the other organisers had time yesterday and after working in high temperatures for ~9 hours I was kinda messed up... Just went through the list of submissions that need ratings and think I removed most of the ones that don't work. If you find any others, please leave a comment so I can check it and remove it!

Hey! No, having more people rate your game does not improve your rating itself.

No.

I will see if one of the organisers has time to go through those submissions and remove the broken ones. If not I will do it tonight (in ~12-13 hours from now.

The jam page states:

The best overall game, and as well the best games in each of the rating categories will be the "true winners". They will get showcased at the top of the page and on our Discord server (including a fancy role).

This means that the highest rating of all categories will be the winners. There will also be an overall winner that has the highest average rating. The only thing the jam hosts do to influence this is checking if the winner in each category has a minimum of 20 votes, if not the first next entry in that category with the highest rating that does qualify for a win (20+ votes) will be the category winner. 

As stated in the answers, we are not allowing new uploads or changes to existing uploads. If you deleted your build that is of course horrible, but we are not going to allow you to re-upload. Sorry!

No, not like the GMTK jam.