Hello community,

Future Inspire Academy is back at it again! Now we are hosting our fifth game jam with a prize value of $960 for the winning team. We don’t just offer cash, but we offer up personal licenses from our partners that are some of the top Unity Assets in the market. This time, we are featuring the new UModeler X, the hot new modeling asset from the creators of the classic UModeler! We also give you other assets chosen by our wonderful sponsors. One even lets you choose what you get!

Unlike our last three jams, this one has a unique gimmick: You must use UModeler X for (almost) all art! This asset provides everything you need to make your models and is very comparable to other established 3D software like Blender! Join our game jam now right here and check out what you can win. Our prize pool is expected to increase over the next two weeks with new sponsors in coming so stay tuned: https://itch.io/jam/future-inspire-jam-5-value-prize

Future Inspire Academy is a non-profit organization that strives to kickstart game development in a fun, convenient, and casual way through our gamifying point system. What makes our game jams unique is our upgradable prize pool where you can redeem more rewards by using points you gain from our program. We offer tons of benefits like daily challenges, weeklies, mentoring, beta access, and more. Read about us here on our dedicated website: https://futureinspireacademy.com/

This is our initial advertisement promotional message but we'll be keeping this post active with new updates and clarifications. Good luck jamming!

Join our discord server now to start learning and stay updated on the game jam: https://discord.gg/22y5x2E52g

Update:

We have acquired a new sponsor: Distant Lands! They are a Unity Asset creator most popular for their 3D COZY Weather assets. For this jam, they are willing to award our winners Thalassophobia: Stylized Oceans. 

You can check out the product on our jam page. This tool increases our prize value by $120. We expect to hear back from more sponsors leading up to the jam, so stay tuned by joining our discord server and keeping an eye out on our website. Thanks Distant Lands for sponsoring us!

Update:

Just a reminder to anyone interested in joining the jam, it is in your best interest to start learning UModeler X now so you can get ahead of everyone during the competition.

I had a debate with some guy today about having titles too misleading and just wanted to get the community's opinion on this so I can improve on future jams. Also this would just help promote the thread

Update:

Jam has officially launched! The theme is Without ___

Fill in that blank with something.

We also had an interesting question about if you had to make a 3D game for this specific jam. When we say you must make a 3D game, we still allow typical 2D genre's like platformer or top down but we'll need to see you use 3D assets for it

Update:

This time we're locking submissions the entire rating period so you must make sure your submission is good to go before the deadline ends. However, you can edit your submission before the submission deadline in case you submitted early but have a better version. There will be no exceptions, so make sure the game is what you want it to be! 

We allowed it last time for a brief moment but this time there will not be any sort of grace period to update the game.

Note: This does not mean it's impossible to submit late. Late submission links should still work. There will still be our 12 hour grace period but once you submit you will be locked in and we won't allow you to change. We had some problems with this last time and it raised concerns about the fairness of the jam so we are being more strict about this.

Just going to keep the community aware that if you are looking for team members to participate in our jam, you can head over to our server (linked on the jam page). We are getting a good amount of discussions about this in the community section of the jam page. We try to answer all the questions there, but obviously, you can get the info much quicker and get communication way easier by joining our server where we post the updates there first. 

Usually we post announcements and updates on the server, and then we try to repost on our old server (still trying to migrate everyone from there) and then we might post here. There can be a delay of possibly one or two days from the server to here so urgent questions should always go to discord. 

But if you're just trying to have casual conversations, totally cool with me to talk here.

Update:

Just wanted to share some cool news that we are featured on UModeler's blog post! You can check it out here: https://docs.umodeler.com/blog/May-26th-2024-blog/

It's always fun to see our organization's growth and how we are able to be recognized in the world outside of our own promotions. Thank you to Jaesik (CEO of UModeler) for this post and congrats to UModeler's other accomplishments this week. Wanted to share this not only because we are proud of the exposure we are getting from other companies but also to show you guys that our organization is slowly but surely getting more known in the world, which has always been the dream.

Update:

We got a cool suggestion from one of our higher up members, saying that I should provide a PNG file of the Future Inspire Jam logo to use as a splash art in Unity. Seems like a pretty cool idea and I'll most likely post it on the discord server, jam page, and maybe here as soon as its ready. 

Update:

We just released our FIA Game Jam transparent banner for you guys to add it on the splash page of your game jam games. This is not required by any means but now its an option for anyone participating that is interested in giving us a shoutout. We will have the drive folder containing the banner on our jam page and in our server

Update:

I think I forgot to mention this on the post, but winners are also awarded a special role in our server. It doesn't mean much other than the title, but its something cool we thought we would try out starting from this jam

Just wanted to put a message out here. This competition is a unique one for us and is obviously more restrictive than our usual jams that we host. But as a result of this, these types of jams are much less competitive. That means if you participate and create some kind of game that meets the requirements, you have a pretty good chance of winning. 

You can come check out one of the games on our server in the jam-devlogs. He is using UModeler X to make very simple 3D models. Nothing complex is needed; you can certainly get by with just basic modeling of rectangles, cyclinders, spheres, and maybe a combination of all of them. Try it out and you might be surprised with the results.

Update:

Wanted to clarify something that was asked in our community forum over on our jam page. Someone asked if they had to use UModeler X for the texturing and then it dawned on me that I never specified fully of what " use UModeler X to make your 3D game" meant. Our goal is to have every participant try UModeler and use it to make their 3D assets and models. Because we never specified that you must use UModeler for texturing, we will allow all members to use other software and free assets for their materials. Again, we only require you to use UModeler for the base model and the coloring, rigging, and all other things can be done through other software if that makes the process easier for you. 

Update:

Just changed the jam description a little bit on the grace period: instead of having to contact me within 5 hours after the jam ends, you just have to contact me sometime within the 12 hour grace period (in other words you get 7 extra hours to contact me) with your itch game page url