#1) Make ten games in ten different genres within ten days.

The ten days do not need to be consecutive, although a 10-day block is less likely to spill over into your holidays uninvited. The jam is one month long to allow you to pick ten days that work for you within that window.

Check out the community, introduce yourself, and keep an eye out for the ten inspirational individual themes... though I expect you'll be able to guess at the pattern. They're not too secret.

#2) You can use any pre-existing work.

I encourage borrowing whatever is convenient from your unreleased "large" games to fashion a smaller submission out of their bones.

I, and many others I know, have a tendency to design very large games and imagine games that might be played for a very long time, or forever. Thinking about the end of a project sometimes doesn't even occur to me. When I was invited to 10mg, I took a big project ("HMDL") and made a small mini-iteration of it: HANDMADEDEATHLABYRINTH issue 0.

The 10-minute limit really helped crystallize the design and scope of something that might have taken much longer to ever see daylight! It was nice getting it out there.

Echoing some of my experience with 10mg, two special features of this year's VMJ:

You are explicitly allowed to use code and design from existing projects, but each game must be ~10 minutes or less! See 10mg for inspiration. My game is like 25 minutes, easy, so I won't hold it against you if you accidentally spill over :/ But seriously! You can take a big project (especially one that feels unfinishable) and take a bite out of it. Make a finite, small, but complete experience.

You can always make the dream game after that too!!!

#3) You can team up!

This year, I released a game as part of the 10mg Collection, and I thought that experience would make the perfect inspiration for 2020's Variety Megajam. So this year's overarching theme is

10 Minute Games!

To me, the heart and soul of the 10mg collection was and is 10 Minute Games: the dream of a world where "small, weird and short videogames" are the norm, are widespread, are commercially and creatively viable. Ten teams collaborated to make ten small, weird and short videogames!

It's pretty rare that anyone actually manages to finish all 10 games for this variety megajam, so I thought it would be fun to do something 10mg-themed. In 10mg, there were ten separate dev teams and we each worked on just one game -- but together we made an amazing bundle of 10 short games! You don't have to find nine friends though, you could just split the ten game goal between yourself and a friend :) Five games each, or nine and one. Just careful your genres don't overlap.

That's it! Now sign up for the jam and make some games :)

-droqen