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Congratulations on winning 2nd place! I sent you a message on Discord, let me know if you get it :) 

Alright everybody, if you haven't rated any games yet, make sure you do! Remember, the winner gets my YouTube course AND a 30min strategy call with me, 2nd place gets the course and 3rd place gets a call. May the best game win!

BTW in the off chance that my game gets into the top 3 I will obviously skip myself. But I'm not worried about that because there were definitely games much better than mine!

Thank you so much!

Alright everybody, get those games posted! No need to tweak things to perfection, get that stuff published and released! Let's go!!! Final stretch!!! You got this!!!

Alright everybody here's our last 6 hours to wrap up our games and get them out the door! There's no time to implement new features - spend at most one-two hours polishing to make sure you have ample time to upload the game stress-free. I know you guys can do it! Our biggest jam had 16 submissions - let's beat that record and get more games made than ever before! 

Good morning!

I hope everybody's games are going well. We already have our first submission! There are still two days left of the game jam, but this is where you need to start being careful. I suggest that you try to finish your game today, so that you have no stress tomorrow when trying to get it polished and uploaded.

So, if you aren't 50% done your game yet, consider taking a quick think and figuring out what features your game DOESN'T need. If you're thinking of implementing more than 1 enemy and are barely done the first type, just stick to 1. If you want multiple weapons or abilities, instead think about how the abilities that already exist in your game can be used in new ways without implementing any new features. If you haven't given your game a good color scheme and good sound effects or game feel yet, make sure you have time to take another look at that, and feel free to ask for feedback before publishing.

Also - I KNOW all 74 of you can FINISH your game! No matter what state your game is in by the end of tomorrow, go on and publish it! It's always worth it, and if you feel like you can't get to that point, or are just too exhausted already: simplify, simplify, simplify.

Best of luck everybody!

Alright everybody, best of luck with your games!

Hey, go vote on the theme for the game jam!

https://www.youtube.com/post/UgkxdDYAfyxEC0u7I2od-kKxAZMDGYb3iWZp

Oof that's rough but hopefuly everybody learned for the next game jam they do :) and thanks!

Idk much about Roblox. You have to be able to post and upload your game standalone to itch.io - if roblox allows that, yes. If not, no.

Hey! Yeah, there is :) https://discord.com/invite/Wys9YHFDY7 

If you already have an engine you know, please by all means use it :) I said to use Unity just to encourage people not to spend too long worrying about which engine to choose. 
EDIT Just realized it was somewhere else that I recommended to use Unity haha - yeah use any engine you'd like :)

Everybody always wonders, "How do these people make games in 2 days!? That's crazy!"

Well, it turns out, it's super easy! Allow me to offer some suggestions to guide your progress through this game jam. There are a few phases of development you'll go through, and you have to be very careful not to overscope your game. It'll be much better to make a simpler game that's more well-made, than to make a bigger/better/more unique/interesting game that's less well-polished.

1) Game Design

When the theme is announced, spend 30 minutes to 1 hour brainstorming ideas. Write down everything you'll need to implement. Make sure you focus on 1 core mechanic. For example, let's say I'm developing a top-down stealth game. Once I've brainstormed, by plan might look something like this:

• WASD Player movement
• Aiming with mouse movement
• LMB shoots projectile from player in direction of mouse cursor; projectile pops when hitting wall
• If projectile hits enemy, damage enemy
• When enemy hits 0HP, he dies. Enemies have 3 HP
• Enemies have vision cones and patrol between fixed positions, and they might spend a few seconds at each position
• When player touches vision cone, enemies will run towards him, avoiding obstacles (need NavMesh)
• Include sfx and particle effects for impacts & enemies becoming aware of player

If you're super new to game dev, you probably don't know how to do a lot of things, for example you might not have even heard of a "navmesh". So, just do your best, and look up tutorials for anything you're not sure about. The less you know, the simpler your design needs to be, so that you can give yourself time to try out the tutorials.

2) Implementation

Most of your time will be spent implementing these mechanics. The more complicated your game design is, the longer it will take you to implement. The more enemy types or obstacle types or variety of certain elements you make, the harder it will be to get your game done. Just focus on 1 enemy type, 1 ability, or 1 obstacle.

Also, the less specific your game design is, the more you will realize you missed as you do your implementation. For example, in my to-do list above, I didn't say "enemies become aware of player if he shoots them," so once it comes time to implement that, I might realize that I overlooked something very important! If you're new at game dev, this is one more reason why you need to keep your game simple, because you will be more likely to overlook certain details.

3) Art

The game forces you to ONLY use in-engine basic shapes to make art - that means no Blender models, no pixel art, no custom fonts, nothing like that. These tutorials should give you some guidance on how to make beautiful art with basic engine shapes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFCVG3H3Lpo 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcNpP3uLbUA

4) Level Design

If this is your first game, don't worry about the intricacies of designing the level layout, just make a simple basic level that showcases the mechanics of your game. If you've made a few games are up to the challenge, think about how you can use your core game mechanic in fun and challenging ways, increasing the challenge and complexity as you go. Also, consider how you can best teach the player the game early on and every time you introduce a new way of doing things.

5) Menus!

If it's your first game, don't worry about a menu, but you do need to somehow tell the player if he wins or loses.

6) Polishing and publishing

Make sure you have at least 6 hours left to polish and upload your game, and fix any bugs you notice as you go. Here's a video explaining how to upload a unity game to itch.io:

Hey, thanks for the comment but this is super old, the game turned out totally different :) maybe someday I'll come back to the immersive sim style.

Check out this video by Thomas Brush and Felipe his 3D artist where they use our art rule to re-create Elden Ring:

I would say stick with the engine's defaults. I feel like it's going to end up a rule that gets somewhat bent, so I would just say, avoid it if you can and use it as a creative limitation.

Visual assets. Any audio assets from anywhere that you have access to is fair game.

Themes are generally not gonna be for everyone. Good luck with the other jam and, wow that's a big team o.O

Pretty much :)

Yes you can use multiple objects :)

Alright everyone, the theme of this game jam is: 

~Something not all that creative and you've probably seen it before~

***Oh you thought that was the theme? No, no, the theme is....***

>NOT THIS ALL CAPS TEXT!!!<

It's "Small input, big output" - in other words, some sort of limited action taken by the player must result in a large effect, or lots of effects, in some way.

And we have a new rule: All art assets must come from your engine, and if your engine doesn't let you create any 3D object or sprite for some reason, you can import cubes/spheres/cylinders, or squares/circles/triangles into the engine, but nothing more complicated than basic shapes. This doesn't apply to any kind of audio.

Resource for art (use this to make your game look good despite being visually simple):

Hey!

Come join the Judica Me Discord Server: https://discord.com/invite/Wys9YHFDY7

Under the "Judica Me Game Jam 2023," you'll find channels related to the game jam. You can ask for help, show off your progress, support each other, and find a team.

Let's make some games!!!

Awesome, excited to have you join! Yes the game can include platforming elements, but platformer and top-down shooter can't be its primary genre. For example, it can be a platforming RPG, which would have something a bit more interesting to it than just a basic platformer.

Glad you learned a lot with this! Awesome :D

Thanks! I don't get why everyone is posting cats, but yeah I appreciate the feedback :D definitely hoping to expand the visuals and ambience as this game progresses.

Ah ok, I'm not familiar with the genre then. But yeah great stuff all around :D And yeah I hope this helped you get a better understanding and motivation for your big project :)

Yup I know, everybody had a short amount of time. Best of luck and hopefully this goes well! Good stuff :D

Absolutely, yeah this is terrific stuff! I'm glad you enjoyed the experience and thanks for posting the game!

It's a great first entry! 

Spectacular stuff. I generally gave you my opinion already but yeah, for the record, visually beautiful, great movement controls and sound (one thing there is you can randomize the pitch of the sounds a little each instantiation). Mechanically not a whole lot to do between watch towers but of course it's kind of intended for that for the atmosphere. It seemed that nothing awaited me at the next watchtower though unfortunately.

There is something so satisfying about placing brightly colored blocks with physics and hearing those popping sounds haha! Some improvements you could make would be to pretty up the background, like maybe add a fog or blend the ground with the sky or something, and vary the pitch by a random amount ever time to place a block. 

A fantastic and incredibly fun core mechanic! The game feels great as-is, maybe a bit more visual flair like particle effects and some subtle squash-and-stretch would've taken it to the next level. Also if you narrow down a great color scheme, you'd have a pretty much perfect game for the scope. 

You nailed the core mechanic and the theme! Visuals work but could definitely get some polish with more time, and the game feel could be drastically improved if you keep in mind the principle of "player presses some option, and a strong result happens immediately". UI doesn't highlight or anything if I mouse over, it wasn't clear how to pick up ore, etc. But that stuff is just a matter of polishing - this is great. 

Looks great visually! Unfortunately, players are going to get very frustrated trying to find objectives with that little direction! So if the swole guy gave us a bit more guidance or if the environment was so designed as to naturally draw us to where these mushrooms would be, that would be a very important improvement, given the focus of this game is essentially investigation. Also consider that people would instinctively assume ALL of the mushrooms would be scattered throughout the entire forest, so not finding them after a decent amount of quick exploration is just intuitively confusing. All in all well done! You certainly nailed the theme in my opinion :) 

Spectacular! Level design makes perfect use of the game mechanic and the progression of difficulty is great. You nailed the gameplay. Maybe it could have resembled a city builder a bit more to better suit the theme but, honestly as-is it's probably better than if you tried to do that. The visuals are probably fine but maybe could use a tiny bit of polish.

I've played 9 games from the jam so far and this one is the best, hands down. I appreciated the way you presented the tutorial, and you totally nailed the idle/clicker mechanic for the scope. By the end my island was just gas stations haha! With more expansion and maybe a few other downsides to certain buildings, like having too many of one type too close together or something, could make this into a fine little Steam release.

Oh by the way, the popping sound when placing objects seems to be a bit delayed - it has to be IMMEDIATE. The game feel is so close to perfect.

My one actual substantial suggestion would be to make sure we can move the camera to some extent, because opening the menu blocks a huge chunk of vision of the city. It would be nice to build while having the menu open, although granted you could just close it every time you choose a new building.

This game is for sure in top 3 most beautiful games on the jam visually. I noticed a few issues:

-The help menu shows WAY too many controls all at once - the UI is quite self-explanatory and I'm looking at the help screen thinking woah, this is complicated - but in truth it is quite simple and easy to understand
-Are the buildings supposed to stay as ghostly outlines after I place them? Is there a delay?
-Clicking to destroy isn't fully accurate for some reason and you can destroy the wrong object it seems
-While moving the object to place it, it doesn't quite follow my mouse, it is always a bit behind. I don't think this should have acceleration or anything like that, and if it does, it should be faster or something because it feels sluggish, like I want to click/place it here, I don't want to wait for the building to catch up

But yeah despite all those fairly harsh points, this is the most impressive game I've played from the game jam yet.

Hi everyone!

So unfortunately, to rate if you haven't submitted a game, I have to explicitly mark you as a judge. I have to do this manually one by one (why is there not just a setting for anyone can rate -_-) and since no one asked yet, I suspect people who haven't submitted a game aren't broadly interested in rating so there's no sense in me doing that for everybody,

SO here's the plan: if you haven't submitted a game but still want to rate, just post a comment and I'll mark you as a judge :) 

This is actually one of the best looking games of the jam. Unfortunately, while it is simple, there really isn't much of a core gameplay mechanic - there is no challenge of any kind, you just exist and wander. Unless I missed the objective. Game feel could be improved considerably: tweak the speeds compared to the animations, add some dust particles when I run, add some audio and ambient music or wind or something, tighten that jumping because it feels like I float like a feather on the way up, and crash like a rock on the way down. Great work on the terrain and on getting the dog working and climbing!

I'm glad someone did the turn-based combat idea :D Visually I gave this a 5/5, it's clean, cohesive, and simple. Core mechanic is nice and simple, you have an aspect of decision-making as to whether to heal or attack, but once I seem to win, nothing really seems to change so there isn't really a reward. The Rock is still there staring at me! Haha xD Obviously when it comes to game feel, audio and visual feedback is crucial to know you hit or got hit. So I gave you 3/5 on the mechanic, 1/5 game feel, 5/5 visuals, 1/5 audio, and 5/5 theme :) Great stuff!