Isn't the point of a game jam to create something within a period as a form of competition? The time limit and ranking is what encourages people to act when they'd otherwise procrastinate; to try innovative ideas without worrying about if the time will be wasted. Without either of those elements, what about this qualifies as a jam?
Here are two ways you could go about digesting the idea:
1. Think of it less like a game jam, and more like a music jam. We're just getting together to play around with ideas inside a wide possibility space, and every year fun and colorful things happen, which makes us happy.
2. Every medium, every genre, every art and type of craft has movements within them that explore and challenge the boundaries of its definition. We're like the slow TV of game jams. We're the Jackson Pollock of game jams.
In any case, it is what you make of it. There is a start and an end date, and many of us try to submit before the deadline, as a creative constraint in traditional game jam fashion.
It's really a matter of point of view. From my perspective a game jam would be defined as "an uncommercial event during which people are invited to create a game" and that's about it.
The relaxed rules of Procjam make it clearly more accessible than more "traditional" game jams, but since making a game is not even a requirement... It's just a friendly jam.
Hey! There's some great replies here already, I thought I'd add just what my thoughts were when originally setting up this jam.
One of the big influences for PROCJAM was Sophie Houlden's Fishing Jam, way back when. The jam let you pick 7 days out of a month to work on a game, so it was time limited but flexible. I did my best ever jam work in that jam, because I picked weekend days and took my time to think in between.
When starting PROCJAM, one of the goals was to bring people from across generative software to make stuff in the same space, so people could see how other folks worked, what ideas and techniques they used, and get sharing and inspiring each other. The problem is, traditional game jams kind of exclude a lot of that. Fast crunching stops lots of people entering if they have jobs or kids or other stuff. And picking winners means people feel pressured to be the best, or discouraged from making messes and experimenting. PROCJAM is definitely a bit different from the big game jams. But actually, a lot of jams work like this now! It's increasingly popular.
Lots of people - myself included - will only work on something during the time limit this year. So you can definitely join in and do PROCJAM like that, it's kind of the standard way for many people. All we do is make sure you have the option to do something else if you need it.
I hope you take part in PROCJAM and enjoy it, either way :)
My game has been around for six years, but I am still still working on it. I see this as an opportunity to meet other like minded developers and have discussions. I like the easy going tone of the jam. It's actually my first game jam as I don't work well under limited time periods ... I will spend a week making one or two features and then debugging all the problems they caused in the rest of my code! :)
Procedural generation often takes the form of some serious programming as well... I've found that in traditional game jams, my procedural efforts just take too much time to get anything else done. Coding can take quite a bit of time, especially when debugging (sigh) is involved.
itch.io mailed me that this was a jam that was coming up... I joined and might even do something, depending on how things go elsewhere.
