Hi everyone!

Congratulations to those of you who completed Sprint 1: Ideation. We’ve loved seeing your progress (and your climate storytelling posts) on Discord all week long. You’ve submitted 67 concepts, amazing job! 

Note: if you did not manage to submit in time but do have a concept, please send your notes to parker@indiecade.com. It won’t count toward this sprint, but you are encouraged to continue on through the jam.

Ideation Reviews To wrap-up Ideation, all submitters and contributors can now access and vote on the submissions. You have 4 days to review concepts from the other teams in a number of categories. We ask that you do not vote on your own projects.

Voting Criteria:

• Promising Idea - How interesting is the concept? In a perfect world where all development goes as planned, would you want to play this concept?
• Reasonable Scope - How reasonable is the scope for the timeline of the jam? Does this project seem larger than the Climate Jam timeline?
• Aesthetic / Art / Sound - How cohesive is the aesthetic? Is there a clear theme? Is there concept art and does it help portray the game's intent?
• Well Planned Production - Is there a clear production plan? Does the developer clearly show a plan to make this, with an understanding of potential risks and unknowns?
• Use of Themes - how effectively or uniquely does this concept engage in the jam's themes ("Climate Change", "Change the Story", or related)?

Sprint 2: Prototype Greenlight Jam co-creator MJ Johns explains the Prototype sprint: 

Your second sprint is Prototype. For the next week, you want you to make the initial prototype of the game. It can be buggy, messy, and have all sorts of placeholders, but you should have the beginnings of a playable experience by the end of this sprint!

This is a time where you test out the simplest versions of your core mechanics, experiment, throw stuff out. Your original concept might radically change during this sprint, and that’s okay!

Submission For this sprint you should try to make some combination of these:

1) Graybox (or whitebox): blocked out level built with primitives, gives a sense of the space and flow of the level, where will objectives and obstacles be? How will the player navigate the space? How do you portray your gameplay mechanics in the space of your world?

2) Beautiful Corner: showcase the art and sound, but no playable experience necessary (maybe have a camera that can move around to view 3D models from different angles or get a sense of 3D sound effects)

3) Minimum Viable Product (MVP): core functionality in a somewhat fleshed out playable space (should give a clear meaningful representation of what the gameplay will be, what actions the player can take, how can they win or lose, etc.)

Submissions for Prototype are due by June 29th at 12pm Noon, Pacific Daylight Time. Submit your Prototype materials here: https://itch.io/jam/climate-jam-2024-prototype

Do not submit to the main Climate Jam itch.io page!

Ranking Once again, after Sprint 2 ends there will be a 4 day period to vote on the other submissions. Here are the criteria. You should be thinking of these for your own project as well.

• Playability
• Promising Idea
• Aesthetic / Feel
• Use of Themes

Jam Community / Discord Update The jam community in the IndieCade Discord server keeps growing! We have jam mentors, resources, climate-related stories our jammers have shared, and places for teams to work together. If you’re not on the server yet, we encourage you to join!

Cohorts Many of our teams have been placed into cohorts, groups of teams that are there so you can give/get feedback, help troubleshoot, and playtest with some of your fellow jammers. If your team has not been added to a cohort and would like to be, just let us know on Discord!

Note for existing cohorts: there will be a slight reshuffling of the cohorts so that only active, contributing teams are together.

We hope you have a great Prototype sprint, we’re so excited to see how your concepts grow and evolve!

Regards, The Climate Jam Team