What can be accomplished in our favorite medium when story takes center stage?

Welcome to the second game jam hosted by Neophyte Studios! If you make games with strong and innovative narratives, then we encourage you to submit. This jam is open to creators who dabble in ALL GENRES and who are at ALL SKILL LEVELS. 

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Who We Are:

Our jam will be ranked by the community. At the end of the voting period the top ten games will be played and streamed by our panel of judges over on twitch.tv/neophytestudios on Wednesday March 24th @ 4pm ct.

Neophyte Studios is a publishing entity formed by the College of Liberal Arts' Creative Writing program at Southern Illinois University and currently consists of fiction graduate students and professor of fiction Pinckney Benedict. The undergraduates, graduates, and professors of our department have worked tirelessly to innovate in the realms of game and audio narrative in laboratories and around campus. Now, we're looking to see what the incredible community of itch can do!

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Criteria:

We are looking for games featuring great narratives. Whether they be highly authored or systems based we are hope to see innovation and impact on a narrative level. Narrative must be at the forefront of the experience. We are accepting submission of all gameplay or thematic genres.

This jam is open to games playable on desktop, browser, OR IN VR. Remember, the top ten game as voted by the community will be streamed on Twitch, so factor that into your design if necessary! The community's ten finalist games will be streamed on the official Neophyte Studios Twitch channel twitch.tv/neophytestudios after the voting period has ended. The Neophyte Studios team will serve as the finalist judges and analyze the narrative structure of the community's top ten favorites.

In order to showcase work from all of our finalists, we ask that you submit a game that demonstrates its narrative inclinations within the first 10-15 minutes of gameplay. However, submitted games LONGER than 10-15 minutes ARE NOT at a disadvantage. If your game is a 100 hour long epic saga, that's fine! Just be sure that whatever you submitted has an observable narrative impact within the first 10-15 minutes. If you only have a short demo, a tease, or a taste of a larger project, that's fine as well! Just remember: A good narrative hooks its audience from the first word, image, or sound. 

One more note on the criteria for this jam. We kindly ask that only games made for this Jam be submitted this time around. So please do not submit what you would consider to be a "finished game." HOWEVER, if you made an unfinished game for our PREVIOUS JAM, you may continue to work on that game and submit it.

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OPTIONAL THEME

For this Jam, we decided to introduce an Optional Theme. This is basically some inspiration for those who may feel stuck on their stories, or those who started their game with our last Jam, and have since hit a narrative wall. We have added another voting criteria for this called "Best Use of Theme." This month's Optional Theme is: DETECTIVE STORY. A mystery need not have a twist around every turn, nor does it need trench coats and smoke-filled bars. A good detective story is one where the external mystery of the narrative mirrors the internal conflict of the protagonist (or player). For this Jam, we'd love to see this interpreted in any way you think could work. What if your game is simply a questionnaire? One where the player investigates a moral conflict, only to realize something about themselves? Or, hell, why not set it in a smoke-filled bar? With trench coats galore and a turn 'round every twist.

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Rules:

1. For this jam we are only accepting games made by solo creators. Keep an eye out in the future for other jams of ours that will be open to teams!
2. Pre-made assets are allowed. Just be sure to credit the appropriate artists in your submission's description.
3. We are open to submissions containing mature content, however aggressively nsfw submissions, at least in the literary world, are often lacking in substantial narrative impact.
4. No harassment by or directed toward any creators or voters will be tolerated.
5. Works in Progress only!
6. Do NOT submit a game with price. Rule #5 should mostly take care of this, but just to be clear, if you intend to charge for your game, please make a free version (it can be a demo (or a demo of a demo)) available to the Jam participants. If the game has a price, we will disregard the entry.

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Voting:

Each game will be voted on in the following categories:

1. Most Compelling Narrative 
2. Best Use of Ludic Elements (Game Mechanics) To Deliver Story
3. Most Compelling Character
4. Most Innovative Narrative
5. Best Use of the (optional) Theme

The seven highest voted games from the first category as well as the highest voted game from the following three categories will be qualify as our ten finalists.

After Submitting:

Come over to our Discord, watch our Twitch stream, and catch up on old Twitch streams on our YouTube channel! We'll be discussing submissions and finalists all the while. So, come say hi!