The big change for this year's theme and operations is that we are ACTIVELY ENCOURAGING people to work on games that were started before and outside of the jam. We saw so many cool game ideas generated during Spoopy Jam 6 and Global Game Jam 2025 that just needed a bit more time to get polished and operational. The student projects on deck from classes that were merely primitives need some attention too.
We're not pressing the active-time-challenge levers like we do for the other IGH jams. Rather than a harsh 48 hours, you've got a very non-competitive THREE MONTHS to button up your work. Sometimes it really is more about having a concrete showcase deadline than the pressure that will get you to get cracking and work. Other times its all about having a social support network encouraging you. Ostara is the gentlest of jams.
Of course you can absolutely make a brand new game from scratch. Let's finally close out some of the open accounts too. The only hard-and-fast rule is that you shouldn't be submitting already completed games from other jams, or just changing a few names/sprites in an existing project. Take the collective initiative and do some real work to cross the finish line, not rerun the race for fake internet cred.
Post up and ask for asset or code help in the discord. Dip in and out of helping someone else. Heck, ask for help from a resident scrum master for getting a burndown chart towards project completion! It's experiment time to get things done and cleaned up.
