I know this is a silly question, but does anyone know if the winners have been announced already or where would we find out who won? I'm just curious because this is my first game jam that I been in, so I'm curious as into how the process works.
Hey Akacheese,
Our guest judges who are professional visual novel developers, have donated their time to review and vote on who their favorites are, seeing as we have 50 entries with many of them being around 20-30mins long, we have given them a month to review and give their results.
So at the earliest we will be releasing the results is next month, but we will send everyone a email through itch.io alerting them when the winners have been announced (only way you wouldnt get this email is if you unsubscribed from the those messages when you got a reminder about posting your entry)
While we would love to give creators this kind of insight from the guest judges we bring in each year from the visual novel industry it just isn't doable with the judges schedules, even if money wasn't an issue, they pretty much would have to put all their projects on hold just to provide critical feedback to every entry for that month.
They are already investing so much time to do what they are now for the jam we really try not to ask any more of them and make things as easy as possible since they are doing this as a service to the community. And even now we get judges that have to turn us down due to a release or heavy development period if it lands around the same time as our jam.
That being said if you want to reach out to a given judge personally and ask for feedback, twitter is our industry tool in the visual novel world and all of them have twitter handles you can reach out to them on and ask for feedback.
@HanakoGames @SapphDragon and @sakevisual were the guest judges this year.