Livestream VOD playlists!

Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/collections/MX0oqO9BUhcLEQ

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnvSyiLebJCe_inbLAvzV66iBxONOLdUD

From real time strategy to virtual pets, nearly all genres of game incorporate some form of probability. Players joke about praying to the "Random Number God" and looter shooter wikis contain detailed breakdowns of drop chances. But there's a lot more to a core game loop than raw statistical probability. Depending on how good a player thinks their chances are, they might feel confident, tense, hopeless, omnipotent.... But you don't have to leave that to chance. In this jam, you must make a game that in some way incorporates the idea "the odds are good" and submit it by the deadline. Whether your game's outcomes are truly random or entirely under your control, beware -- in this jam the odds are good, but the goods are odd.

See winners of previous jams here!

Jam dates:  The jam begins March 10 at midnight and ends at 11:59 PM  on March 26. All times CST (GMT-6).  When in doubt, the itch timer is the final authority on how much time is left to submit your entry.

Jam format: Before the start of the jam, you may form teams, create plans, set up repos, etc, but may not begin development (ie, creating code, assets, etc) until the jam officially begins. You may submit your game at any point during the development period, but no submissions will be accepted after the deadline. 

Medium: valid submissions to this jam will either be software applications (something that can be run on a computer) or tabletop format.

Joining a team Participants are strongly encouraged to team up with other entrants! Find people who complement your strengths! Looking for teammates? Come say hi in the Dogpit Discord! We also encourage you to say hi in the discord regardless and meet other chill gamedevs, artists, game audio people, voice actors, and other neat folks!

Contact @TeamDogpit or info@teamdogpit.com. Tweet your game WIPs with the hashtag #dogpitjam so we can find and retweet them!

Jam Stream: All entries will be played live on stream at https://twitch.tv/manuelaxibanya with commentary by guests and judges. The livestream will take place over the weekend of April 3, 2023, with games divided into scheduled blocks. The schedule will be posted 1-2 days after the close of submissions. The judging deliberations and announcement of winners will be streamed about a week after the livestream, with exact date TBA. Voting for community choice will remain open until the judgement livestream begins.

Categories and Judging: The winner of each category except Community Choice is selected via consensus among a panel of judges.

• Game of Jam 
  • The "winner of the jam," the best game when considered as a fully-realized game. It may not have the best art, best audio, or best gameplay, but considered as a whole it has the most effective implementation of art, audio, and gameplay as a cohesive experience.  Because the winner of Game of Jam is assumed to have excelled in all categories, it will not be eligible to win any of the Judge-selected sub-categories, but it may still receive Community Choice if so determined by popular vote.
• Best Gameplay
  • Awarded to the entry with the most innovative, clever, or just plain fun interactions and mechanics.
• Best Art
  • This category recognizes those games which are a feast for the eyes, be it from environments, VFX, characters, interfaces, or all of the above.
• Best Audio
  • The winner of best audio features sound that is not just pleasing but tightly integrated with the core experience of the game itself. 
• Best Use of Theme
  • Awarded to the game that not just implements the theme creatively, but implements it so thoroughly that if you took away everything related the theme there wouldn't be a game left
• Community Choice
  • The winner of the popular vote! The only category whose winner is not selected by a panel of judges.

Judges are Xibanya (organizer), Hempuli, Dieting Hippo, Approaching Infinity, and more TBA

Prizes: Winners will receive keys for Team Dogpit games and any other prizes donated by member of the community.

Bounties: anyone (including those who do not submit a game) is welcome to post bounties, that is, to create challenges to other participants and give their own prizes to those who fulfill them. If you come up with a bounty, let us know! If we like the idea we'll list it here on the main jam page! Please note that while bounties are encouraged, they are not officially recognized judging categories and the manner in which winners are selected, prizes (if any) are distributed, etc, is entirely at the discretion of the respective bounty's creator.

JAM RULES

If you fail to follow the rules you WILL be removed from the jam.

• Make a game that incorporates the theme and submit it by the deadline.
• Don't work on your game until the jam begins (this is enforced solely by the honor system so please respect your fellow jammers!)
• You must have the right to submit your entry. 
• Absolutely no hate speech or harassment of any kind in entries or the community. 
• Downloading your game must be free or payment-optional.
• Software applications submitted must be playable on Windows 10 or in-browser.
• Tabletop games submitted must be in PDF format. 
• Software applications must NOT launch fullscreen by default.

Jam Suggestions

If you fail to follow these suggestions you WILL cry.

• Make sure it's possible to launch your entry BEFORE you start uploading it.
• If you are making a game in Unity and have UI canvasses, set the UI Scale Mode on the Canvas Scaler component to "Scale With Screen Size" and set the reference resolution to 1920x1080.
• Make sure your game doesn't automatically pause if the window loses focus or it may cause audio/video hitches during the livestream. (If using Unity, go to Project Settings > Player > Resolution and Presentation and enable "Run In Background" to make sure your game doesn't halt if the player clicks outside the window.)

FAQ

Q: I've never made a game before, can I enter?  A: Yes

Q: I'm not very good at making games, should I enter? A: Yes

Q: Can I use Gamemaker, Unity, Unreal, my own boilerplate, and/or my own engine?  A: Yes

Q: Can I reuse my own code from prior projects? A: Yes, though if you do so it would be sporting to open source that code and link it in the community Discord server so that anyone could use it if they wanted to.

Q: Can I take a game I have already made and modify it to fit the theme?  A: No

Q: What time zone determines the start and end dates?  A: Central Standard Time (CST, GMT - 6) 

Q: Can I join the jam after it has already started?  A: Yes, you can join at any time. You just have to submit a game before the deadline. 

Q: Can I work with a team?  A: Yes

Q: Can I be a member of more than one team?  A: Yes

Q: Is there a limit to the number of people that can be on the same team?  A: No

Q: Can I use open source assets, unity store assets, or other assets that are available to the general public?  A: Yes, you can even use paid assets without having to share them with everyone else if anyone could also buy it if they wanted to (ie, Unity Asset Store stuff, patreon rewards, and so on.)

Q: What happens if I don't submit my game in time?  A: Your game won't be judged and won't be played on the livestream. I still encourage you to keep working on the game on your own time though.

Q: Can I update my game after the end of the jam?  A: Yes, you can update your public-facing game files as much as you like after submissions close, but judging will be based on what was live at the moment the submission period ended.

Q: Do you even know what you're doing? A: We're pretty good at this whole jamming thing. Past jams include Games vs Nazis and Sim Jam!

Q: Can I have gore in my game? A: Yes, as long as you include a warning on the itch page and/or in the game itself so that players can decide for themselves if they want to engage with that content or not. Do not depict any specific real person who is alive today being killed. (Killing Atilla the Hun = OK, killing Justin Beiber = not OK)

Q: Can my game have sexually explicit content? A: Yes! But in order to be eligible for judging, it must include a mode that covers up any content forbidden by Twitch's sexual content policy so that jam organizers are not banned when they stream it on twitch.

Q: Can I submit a VR game? A: Games that can be played on a Quest 2 will be played during the livestream but VR and AR games are not eligible to win in any category and will not be judged.

Q: How much time will my game get on stream? A: Nothing is guaranteed but it is typical for about ten minutes to be spent on any one game. You can check out past livestreams to get a good idea of what to expect.

Q: What do you mean by "you must have the right to submit your entry"? A: Don't break NDAs (like by submitting something you made for your employer that would get you fired if they found out), don't take an existing game that belongs to someone else and pass it off as your own work (yes participants have actually tried that), don't steal art or music from small creators who didn't give permission, etc.

Q: What sort of thing can I make a bounty? A: Any arbitrary criteria you can think of. Think of what might be fun or interesting to encourage others to do.  One year a member of the community put a bounty on Waluigi making an appearance in the submitted game, offering various steam keys as a reward. Sure enough the bounty was collected. On another occasion a community member challenged participants to create the most elaborate game page for their entry and awarded copies of Dream Daddy to their top two picks. 

Q: Will there be a secondary theme announced at the start of the jam, as there has been in most jams past? A: Not this time! The sole theme is “the odds are good,” to be interpreted however you like.

Q: Any other tips? A:

• Use a typeface other than LiberationSans or Arial (the default fonts of TextMeshPro and Unity's legacy TextMesh respectively.) You worked hard on your game, don't ruin it by having a lazy-looking UI! You can find tons of free fonts at https://fonts.google.com/. 
• If working with a team, make sure at least two people are capable of creating a build so that if the principal developer is unexpectedly not available right before the deadline someone else can still submit the game before it's too late. Deadline extensions will not be granted to any team for any reason. 
• As a courtesy to those who mouse left-handed, if your game uses WASD for movement, map movement to the arrow keys as well.
• If it takes more than 10 minutes to see the majority of your game's content, allow some means to resume progress after the application is closed, either via loading a save, using a password, or simply allowing players to jump to any stage of progression they like.

Q: An organizer announced on social media that we have X days/hours left, but the itch timer says Y days/hours left, which is it? A: The itch timer is the ultimate source of truth. If an organizer's statement contradicts the timer, the organizer is mistaken. 

Q: What if I make a game that follows the rules to the letter but does so in a way that deliberately creates the negative outcomes the rules exist to prevent? A: Every jam someone tries to come up with some lawyer perfect way to play Stop Hitting Yourself with the rules, apparently under the impression that Dogpit Jam is a government agency accountable to some sort of regulating authority when in fact it is just a loose association of private individuals who can't be compelled to play an annoying video game if they don't want to.