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Table of Contents

• About The Jam
• Competition Rules
• Joining The Jam
• Rating
• Links
• Ownership
• Prizes
• FAQs

About The Jam:

The Insanity Jam is a relaxed, experimental, game jam that utilizes a custom-built random game idea generator originally inspired by orteil42 (creator of Cookie Clicker)'s generator. This Jam aims to be an inclusive learning experience, welcoming game creators anywhere in the world of all skill levels, from newbies to professionals, to make games and talk about their own process.

Our goal with the Insanity Jam is to inspire people to think outside the box to create imaginative games that are truly bizarre and wonderful, to test and stretch our limits and experience as game developers, to encourage game developers to stick to their ideas and see them through to the end, and to share ideas, insight, and advice with fellow game developers.

Learn more about the Insanity Jam name and history!

Insanity Jam 5 runs from January 15th to January 25th. All games are due before the midnight of your own time zone on the 25th. See the rules below for more details.

Competition Rules:

1. You may work either alone or in a small team.
   • A small team is considered to be 2-4 people, but there is some lenience.
2. All game code and content must be created within the game jam time limit:
   12:00 am January 15th to 11:59 pm January 25th (Use your own time zone).
3. Your submitted game must be based on your randomly generated idea.
4. You must post your progress on your game announcement topic in the Community Forum.
   • Follow the Game Announcement Guidelines when posting your announcement!
   • Screenshots are encouraged as well.
5. Copy your game seed directly into your announcement post so you can find it later. You must provide it when you submit your game.
   • This is just so anyone can go back and re-generate your game idea from the generator.
6. All publicly available libraries and middleware are allowed.
   • If you wish to utilize your own previously-written frameworks or other code, please make it publicly available before you use it.
7. All content creation and development tools are allowed. (3dsmax, Photoshop, Flash, Game Maker, Unity, etc.)
8. You are encouraged to include your source code/files, but you don't have to include it if you don't want to.
9. Follow the rules and ask questions in the Help & Feedback topic if you need any help or clarification.
10. Post requests or offers for help on the Classifieds Bulletin Board first, and only use the forum for collaboration after the fact if you can't find other means (like email).
11. You must do your best, take care of yourself, and have fun. :)

Joining the Jam:

Anyone may join this jam! All you need to do is:

1. Generate your game idea,
2. Create a thread in this jam's community following the Game Announcement Guidelines,
3. Get started when the jam begins,
4. Post your progress in your thread,
5. Check the Classifieds Bulletin Board if you need help or want to help someone,
6. Submit your game when it's done,
7. Rate other entries as they're submitted!

You'll need an Itch.io account to do all of this stuff. You can also use the #insanityjam hashtag on Twitter and your updates will show up on the updates section of this jam. If you post anywhere else, be sure to tag it with "insanityjam" as well so anyone can find your progress more easily and know you're participating!

You can post your game announcement any time before the start of or during the jam and start thinking of ideas, planning, and gathering materials/tools, but do not begin working on your game until the jam begins! Again, please follow the Game Announcement Guidelines and create a game announcement thread in the community for your plans and progress. We all want to learn from each other!

To submit your game, just create and upload your finished game to itch.io from your Dashboard, and then it will be visible to choose as your submission for this game jam when you click the Submit button at the top of this page.
Note: The submit button does not appear until the jam begins, but once it starts, you may submit your game at any time!

When you do submit your game, be sure you include a detailed description of the game on your game page and how to actually play your game.

Rating:

Without rates, there are no winners! Anyone can play and rate games on itch.io and it's super easy, so as games are submitted, please check them out and rate them using the provided categories. The categories are explained more fully below.

• Games can be given a star rating out of 10 in 5 categories:
  • Gameplay / Control
    • The game feels good to play in general
      or
      The controls make sense in the context of the game, i.e. a QWOP-like game feels terrible to play, but that's the point.
  • Fun / Feel
    • The game is fun to play
      or
      It is presented well—depends on the game's style, i.e. Papers Please isn't necessarily fun to play, but it's interesting and gets its point across well.
  • Depth / Intrigue
    • The amount of stuff in the game to get, do, or discover
      or
      It made you want to keep playing, i.e. an arcade game to get a high score.
  • Use of Generated Idea
    • Did the game as a whole represent the generated idea well? I.e. if a generated idea includes "cat" and there are no cats in the game, the idea is probably not very well used.
  • Visuals / Audio
    • Visual coherence, style, etc. I.e. Thomas Was Alone isn't photorealistic or graphically stunning, but it looks good.
      and/or
      Audio coherence, style, etc. in the sound effects and music, i.e. bouncy cartoon sound effects on top of grungy rock probably won't sound good or make sense.
• Be fair, but adjust your rating based on the fact that everyone participating only gets a week and 2 weekends to make the entirety of what you're playing.
• The scores given for these 5 categories will be averaged into a single 10-star rating that you can use to gauge what games are most popular and/or of the highest quality.
• Games that receive a high average rating (7+ stars) from at least 10 votes will be added to a "Winners" list on the Insanity Jam homepage, so be sure to get people to play and rate your game!

Links:

• Insanity Jam Home Page
  
  • Learn everything about the Insanity Jam and see past winners!
• Game Idea Generator
  • Get your game idea to participate. Be sure to save your Seed!
• Classifieds Bulletin Board
  • Need help with the jam? Want to help someone with the jam? Post a short flyer on the free, public bulletin board! Check back often—flyers last 7 days. Collaborate however you want.
• Community Forum
  • A forum for this jam specifically. Announce your game idea, meet up with people you find on the Classifieds Board, and talk about games, game development, and strategies.

Ownership:

You retain ALL rights to your creations. NO distribution rights to ANYTHING you post on this website are claimed by the admin staff or affiliates of Insanity Jam. You can do whatever you want with your finished game. Expand it, sell it, release it, delete it. It's up to you. That being said, be aware that all of the terms and conditions of Itch.io stand on their own and must be agreed to upon creating an account and uploading games to their service.

The organizers do request the right to use your game for purpose of publicizing the competition. This is up to you however, and anything posted on the Insanity Jam Tumblr that includes any content that you created can be removed or edited at your request.

The following paragraph should go without saying, but:
If you used any resources within your game that you personally did not create (graphics, music, sounds, whatever), the creators of those resources retain whatever rights they originally specified when you retrieved the resources. You will also be considered a significantly better person if you provide adequate credit to the original creators within your game as well over if you do not include credit. DO NOT USE resources that you do not explicitly have permission to use or else you will be rightfully subject to the consequences of doing so.

Prizes:

There are no physical, virtual, or cash prizes for Insanity Jam. Zero, none, nada, nothing. We are just as poor as you or more so. However, you will earn these fabulous mental prizes:

• additional pride for having completed a game jam,
• more experience as a game developer, and
• the potential for slightly more limelight than you would originally have had if you had not participated in the Jam.

FAQs:

Question:
Oh no! I chose my game idea but I forgot to write down the seed and now it's not in the generator's History box anymore! Can I still submit my game?? It was a randomly generated seed that I couldn't possibly remember, too! Not a string of text I could potentially guess again!
Answer:
That's totally fine! You can still submit your game, just write that you forgot the seed in the field where it asks you to write your seed! Or you can even leave it blank! The only penalty is that you have to live with the crushing embarrassment of everyone knowing you didn't read the rules before generating your seed! :)

Question:
If I get my idea early, may I plan out the game now and begin development when the Jam actually starts? By plan I mean work out a story line, maybe sketch concepts but NOT the actual game art, etc.
Answer:
ANY type of non-implementation planning before the Jam starts (ie. planning, sketching, creating flowcharts, testing if software works) is perfectly fine. Just don't implement anything (ie, create actual graphics, code, music, sound fx, etc.). However, as this is the INSANITY JAM, it could be fun to limit yourself to only using an idea you generate on the day it begins! :)

Question:
I'm not sure if it would be alright if I made a Super Mario/Whatever ROM hack? Of course I'd still use a random game idea, so basically I would use the ROM as my "engine" and try to get most sprites and sounds changed. The final game would then come with an emulator and I'd make a simple batch file to open the game in the emulator.
Answer:
If you are able to alter the game enough so that it is more or less unrecognizable from the original and truly only use it as an engine, then I don't see why that level of work would be invalid. Just do your best to make the game unlike the game you're building on and don't use any of the same assets (graphics, sound, music, etc.), and it should be ok. Of course, just don't try to sell it. Legal issues are awful.

Question:
The rules say "All game code and content must be created within the game jam time limit." Is my game disqualified if I use canned music and sound effects that have permissive licenses (freesound, CC and public domain works, etc) or free/permissively licensed fonts/typefaces?
Answer:
Freesound, CC and public domain works, etc. that have been created before the Jam began are totally fine to use, just try not to rely on them for all sounds in your game—try to make some of your own. Definitely use whatever fonts you want (as long as you follow each font's individual license) because making fonts is ridiculous work that definitely wouldn't fit into any jam's time frame. Nothing counts against you and you won't get disqualified or anything. The point of the jam is to have fun with other devs and get more experience.

Question:
What do you do if your game is completely broken/unplayable/bad when you upload it and this negatively affects your ratings?
Answer:
Sorry, the ratings can't be reset, but you can try to track down anyone who's rated low and see if you can get them to play again and revise their rating when you re-upload a working version. It's up to you to make sure the game is playable when you submit.

If you have any questions that are not addressed here, feel free to direct them to help@insanityjam.com, where someone will do their best to assist you as quickly as they can.