We’ve had quite a number of queries about the rules on paid assets, tools and engines this week.

The jam’s rules are clear that we do not generally allow paid game engines or assets: we don’t want HAGJ to be a pay-to-play field. However, we recognise that a number of people have missed these rules, or found edge cases such as paid add-ons to software or cases where software was obtained for free but is not usually.

We’ll be working to improve the visibility of our rules for the next jam, but we don’t want people to be unable to submit their hard work for this one. As such, if you think an aspect of your work is borderline or might raise questions regarding the paid asset rules, or if you’ve unintentionally broken the paid engines rule, we recommend that you submit your entry anyway, with a clear disclaimer as to what materials you used. For the purposes of determining jam winners, we as the HAGJ team then reserve the right to impose post-hoc scoring penalties, variable depending on the scale of the infraction, on entries that have broken or skirted the rules in this way. This will avoid us having to fully disqualify such entries but retain the overall spirit of the rules as written.

We hope that this will allow us to be fair to everyone: we don’t want to stress people out over a misunderstanding of the rules, but it’s also important to us that people who did follow the rules as written aren’t unfairly disadvantaged for having done so. We’ll of course be working to update and tighten up aspects of our rules for HAGJ11 to avoid this problem recurring in future and clarify edge cases.

Thank you all who are taking part in HAG10, and we hope this update helps. Good luck with getting your entries finished. 🙂