A relaxed 12 day game jam similar to the 12 Days of Sketchmas. The jam officially runs from 0:00 on Valentines Day until 23:59 on the 25th of Feb. However, I said this is a relaxed jam, I'm well aware that on a longer game jam, life tends to get in the way and as such you have an additional 5 days, until the end of Tuesday the 2nd of March, to submit your game(s).

How It Works

The rules are simple. Create a small game/sketch of a game over the 12 days that the jam officially runs for. You are free to use whatever engine you see fit, bonus points for an open source engine like Godot or Amethyst (we have a list of open source/free/freemium engines on the Discord server). If you'd rather create a small print-and-playable tabletop game, that's also acceptable.

There are at least two ways you can tackle this. The first and simplest is to create a new mechanic for your game each day. By the end of it you will havea game with 12 simple mechanics. For example movement, trading, attack, defence, etc it's up to you how low/high level you want to make the distinction between mechanics.

The second way is to create 1 small game each day. By the end of the jam you will have 12 teeny tiny games.

You could also spend a few days creating the core game and then the rest of the jam creating levels/content for the game, one for each remaining prompt.

Remember, the goal of the jam is to give you something productive and fun to do in any downtime you might have. You shouldn't take it too seriously and don't worry if you get behind or have to drop out. Most importantly don't make your games too complicated (Something I'm always guilty of in game jams).

The only rules are that the project must be started during the jam period and use assets you have the rights to (see the Assets section below for more information). Please don't submit games you are already working on or games you already submitted to other jams.

Submissions

Hey, you said the jam ends on the 25th, why are submissions open until the 2nd?

This may seems strange, normally game jams limit submissions to maybe a few hours after the official deadline however I want this jam to be as stress-free and productive as possible with the minimum number of people getting disheartened and abandoning their projects. The original concept was for the art jam which needs no extension however I realised with the Sketchmas game jam people may need more time to work around family commitments

If people really don't like this style of submission deadline I'm open to change it for any future iterations.

If you are going to create a lot of small games you are free to submit each day's creation as a separate file or more preferably create a single game with a main menu that has a list of each entry, somewhat like those old anthology cartridges you'd get on consoles like the Mega Drive/NES.

Of course, if you're making one game for the whole jam, this isn't a concern, just upload it as normal.

You are free to release your games under any license you see fit but if you feel able, a permissive open source license would be great so people can see how you did stuff and learn cool new techniques.

Assets

You are free to use any art/sound assets you have the right to use. This could be assets from an existing game you've made to Creative Commons/CC0 assets on sites like OpenGameArt.org. The idea of the jam is to put something theme-related together in a short space of time each day. You are of course also free to create everything from scratch each day.

Discussion

If you want to get involved we have an official Discord for the 12 Days of Sketchmas game and art jams.

Voting

After submissions end there will be a week of voting.

For this jam there is a new voting criteria: "Asset coherence" explained below.

Gameplay - How well does the game play? Is it enjoyable, fun, interesting?

Theme - How well did the game/games fit the prompts for the jam

Creativity - How unique is the game, does it blend genres, tell a good story or use assets in an unusual way?

Asset Coherence - Given that free assets can be used how well did the entry use the assets to create a sense of a single product/project. Do the assets feel like they belong together or do they feel like a jumble of unrelated pieces. Does the game still feel OK without the coherence?

Prompts

Prompts will be released 24 hours before the jam starts so you can plan how you want to tackle your submission(s).

Think of the prompts as less of a theme that must be adhered to and more of a guideline, a bouncing off point to develop your game or systems within the game. Feel free to use as many or as few of the prompts as you like.