Congratulations to our two winners!

The Secret of Mossbrook by Campbell and Workshop in the Ironwood Grove by Doctorspacebar. They each won a $30 prize! We will be reaching out to you shortly about the best way to get your prize to you. Thanks everyone for your submissions, and remember that feedback for every game will be posted in the community forum. Please check that out!

Welcome to Heavy Pepper's RPG Maker Game Jam! 

This is a low intensity, month-long game jam where you'll finish and submit a short RPG maker project using ONLY the base assets and features included with whatever version of RPG Maker you use. That means no custom sprites or tilesets, no custom music, and no plugins. While you have a month to do it, I encourage you to think of this as a weekend project. The month-long duration is simply to ensure we get as many submissions as possible. 

There will be two modest prizes given out, one based on judge or contributor voting and one based on Heavy Pepper's choice. Details are TBD. 

Who can submit? 

Anyone is welcome! While this is made to be beginner-friendly, RPG Maker veterans are encouraged to participate.

What engine? 

Any version of RPG Maker you can legally obtain and submit an entry with. You must submit a version that can somehow be played on a modern Windows PC (whether it's stand-alone or HTML), so that the host and other judges/contributors can actually play it. 

How long? 

Aim for a 30-60 minute game to ensure that the host and judges can actually review it. This is a soft rule, as playtime can very depending on the player.  If you find that you've made a 15 minute game but it still feels "complete" to you, submit it! 

What has to be in it? 

There are no formal content requirements for this jam other than it being RTP/base engine-only and no plugins or scripts, and a game you make for this jam specifically. If you want a little more of a prompt to spark your creativity, you can optionally try for a Spooky game with at least 1 "town" and 1 "dungeon", however you want to interpret these words. There are no restrictions on graphic or adult content, but please provide some content warnings if you get particularly dark, gross or crass. Please do not submit hateful content. 

When do we submit? 

While the deadline is October 31st, I highly recommend you submit early and then revise. Get the broad strokes of your game down  with the minimum amount of work necessary to put it in a playable state, then revise after. You can always update your submission afterward. Please note that each participant should only submit one game.

What happens after? 

After the October 31st deadline there will be a 10 day window during which Heavy Pepper will play every game and write up feedback for each entry. Depending on the number of submissions, we may get some volunteers involved to play some and provide additional feedback. Contributors will also be able to vote on their favorite entry during this time, which will win one of the two prizes. 

What are the prizes? 

These are a secret, which really means they have not been determined yet. They will be pretty modest. The real prize will ultimately be finishing an RPG Maker project and getting some feedback! 

Any flexibility on RTP?

If you happened to buy an asset pack on Steam or something, and are unsure what's considered RTP, don't worry about it. The point of these limitations is to discourage people from worrying about custom assets, not to force you to spend a bunch of time checking your database. Just use your best efforts to stick primarily to RPG Maker's base tools and assets, that's all we ask.