Hi there, congratulations on winning the Bullet Hell Jam 2022! I'm one of the jam hosts, and as stated on the page, there's a few prizes we'd like to give you. If you have any way to contact you or your team, please let us know! Discord is preferable however if that isn't possible we're ok with speaking over email too.
Congrats again, look forward to hear back from you soon!
"Halloween" is a super rough guideline because we didn't want to restrict people to just "Horror" or "Ghost" or anything like that. You can theme the levels with halloween themed creatures and assets, for example, or just have the main character as a ghost. Pretty much anything you yourself consider to be Halloween-themed can work. Also there's a rule which says the game doesn't have to be horror and that we want to encourage people to be creative, so I have a feeling that the majority of the games won't be horror. Hopefully this helped and good luck on your game!
yeah you can still make it! There's no harm in applying and we'll still feature you as long as you have a legitimate link, aka your YouTube channel, and are interested in making something, then sure!
Good luck! To be honest on the discord server some other people were asking about how far is *too far*, so I just wanna preface this if you ever do feel like making the dark/cult game :p If you think it's bordering the NSFW line, then just add a warning at the start of your game and/or on the itch page, as it helps a ton with moderation and just making sure everyone has the best experience.
For example it's quite hard to have a theme like sacrifice as a Halloween story mechanic, without having a lil' bit of blood here and there haha, as long as you just make it clear what's gonna be in the game then it's fine. Same applies for anything religious that could potentially be offensive or anything, so if you're not sure if it's too much or not, just to be safe I'd put a warning somewhere.
Anywho, that was a bit of a rant sorry. Super excited to see what you make and have fun!
SACRIFICE! hmm... I wonder what you could do with this... guess we gotta wait and see! Get as creative as you like, and I hope you all enjoy this year's jam!
If you're looking for advice or help before, or during the jam, feel free to ask anytime on our discord server or on here! I'm always nervous for game jams too haha ｡ ｡ ゛(ﾉ><)ﾉ Wish you the best of luck and have fun!
Hiya, it's me Mochii🎃 again :p. Hope you're all looking forward to the jam! In another post (here) I covered how to design, plan and prototype a game for your game jam and some tips which might help you. This time I'll be talking about the creation of your game and hopefully some of these will be useful!
This might sound counterintuitive to the entire purpose of a jam but, just because a it requires you to make the entire game in an allotted time, doesn’t mean you have to make everything completely from scratch, especially if you’re working solo. As a developer, it’s incredibly difficult to be talented in every aspect of the process✨, just because of how many skills you need to create a fully polished video game and that’s the reason people work in teams, to share all of your talents and skills to make a good game in all aspects of design👥, but if you’re working solo it’s ok for some things to be less polished than others. Perhaps programming is your strong suit but you don’t normally do art🎨. There’s no shame in downloading some free 3D low poly assets if the jam permits it (which this jam does for the most part💖), as long as you give appropriate credit. The same applies for music, sfx and shaders. There are many resources online or people to talk to to help you improve in any part of being a game dev, but it’s ok to use premade assets every now and again, especially for jams!🍯
🔹Tip 2 - STAY HEALTHY (please):
Don’t dedicate your entire being to making the game, it’s not a way of life, more a fun challenge for you or your team👥! At first I also didn’t consider this a tip but a more experienced developer told me it was vital and it really makes sense✅. If you’re surviving on Fizzy drinks🍾/coffee☕/pizza🍕 you’ll make some mistakes that you otherwise wouldn’t make if you were more refreshed. So eat healthy, sleep enough💤🛌, drink lots of water🚰, have a decent amount of time for breaks, and if you’re ever stuck on anything I’ve found that just changing your environment is a great way to change your headspace and get fresh new ideas or problem solve better⛺. (Thanks mum for that tip it’s genuinely rly useful😁)
🔹Tip 3 - hAvE fUn:
And finally, the one that you were all expecting and will now proceed to face palm to, have fun! Don’t worry too much about your rating, I know it’s hard to do sometimes but don’t compare yourself to other game devs too much💻, because the winner of a jam normally has lots of unseen experience and a perhaps even a lifetime of knowledge that you can only accumulate through doing jams🧠. Just submitting a game is a massive achievement. everyone has scrapped jam games which they weren’t able to finish in time. Jams aren’t meant to create your dream game or big release title🏆. In some cases they do inspire full scale games, but in most cases they’re just a bit of fun for everyone, including yourself! Be proud of it, even if it’s not as fun as you imagined, or if it’s very short, people will give you feedback and you should embrace it all, treating it as an experience to learn more about game dev.
If you don’t have fun doing it or aren’t proud, then it’s hard to stay open minded. Stay healthy, do your best and just enjoy it!✨
Yep any game is perfectly fine for the jam! (All the art is just pixel art on this page cos that's the only thing I can remotely do without my brain dying haha) Good luck with your game!
Good luck!✨Just as an extra note, there is a theme category for the voting so if you think there's an easy way of implementing the theme, I personally would because it means people can vote high on it :D
Hiya! If you wanted to upload multiple games onto a single page, then you'd have to just add it on there by yourself manually, so yeah unfortunately the download analytics and views will be lost in doing so.
About the theme, there will be an added theme/limitation announced which you can try and incorporate into your game idea already, on top of making it Halloween themed. It's there just to help people if they are stuck with creating an initial game idea, and we tend to make the theme fit very easily with the Halloween style, for example last year we had the theme "Mask the Truth", which created lots of really awesome games about deception and things like that, which works quite well with a spooky setting.
However if you don't want to use it then that's completely fine too! Jams themes are just there to try and provoke new or unique mechanics but as always you don't have to use it if you don't want to.
Hi everyone! I'm Mochii🎃, one of the hosts for the jam. Just wanted to say hi and wish y'all luck :p Here are also some useful tips for jams in general, to help you succeed in submitting a game!
Of course the first thing I have to talk about is scope. hollow knight wasn’t made in 48 hours :p keep your scope small, or at least realistic to the length of the jam. Often the best games for a game jam are small, often replayable ones 🎮.
These games keep people typically for about 5-10 minutes, and if you can make that amount of time fun and engaging, then you’ve succeeded 😊! It isn't about making anything massive, and it doesn't even have to be that original! 😮
🔹Tip 2 - Planning an idea:
A good planning tip that some of you might have heard before is, plan how long you think the game idea you have would take to make, then double that amount of time. ⌛
Some things may take a lot longer than you initially predicted, or an event may come up that requires you to halt progress for a while 🛑, and so this will help you make a game which balances scope and quality well ✅. It takes experience to gauge how long a certain feature / mechanic will take to create as well, so if you’re starting out, I recommend sticking with a small concept to just get the feel of jams in general 🎯.
I know that myself and a lot of other developers haven’t submitted to a jam they were participating in just because of scope, and that’s ok 💜 because it works as a learning experience for next time, so naturally the more jams you do, the more you’ll be successful to submitting to, as with any skill! 😁
🔹Tip 3 - Prototyping:
At the beginning of the jam, when they announce the theme, don’t be scared to draft ideas📜!
For the first couple of hours I always like to spend time drafting and sometimes prototyping🔨, because the first idea you get when you receive the prompt might not be the best or most fun thing your brain can think of🧠, and so I’ll sketch or write ideas on a piece of paper, or join a voice call 🎤 with my team and iterate.
That way, When we’re all somewhat in agreement 😜, and begin making the game, we have a clear plan and know what we want the end result to be, which not only acts as motivation 📈, but also means we can refer back to it when someone comes up with another idea later in the process, to see if it fits with our intent for the game. Jam games like all games are flexible during the designing phase. 🍯
Those are my tips done for the day! Hope it helps with planning and designing, and I'll definitely come back to share some things I learnt about the actual jam process itself 😃, such as workflow and all that good stuff. Bye for now!👋🌊
Hi there, glad you're looking forward to making something for the jam🎃! The way it normally works is that when you submit a game, it automatically gets uploaded onto your itch page too.
So during the voting period, your game will have a special submission page just for the jam, but there is always a permanent page which is up on your itch account, from the moment you submit. (This permanent page is the one you can customize to look nice and all that)
This means you don't have to do any timing stuff because itch should handle it all for you 👍 Hope this helps and enjoy the jam!
glad you liked the game! (one of the cheats was to actually drag the bar downwards to make it recharge faster ;D spoilers!) we had a lot of fun making the start menu too, thanks for playing and rating!
incredible game! the concept was really unique and fun, and I just really enjoyed playing it. 5/5 on everything! the art, sound design and juice felt just right and if you wanted to, this could be something you can create a post jam version of!
the art was super consistent and fun! nice game, although I didn't know where the cheating came into play, because I wasn't sure which buttons it was, and I wasn't able to find the end
update! I got a friend to export a mac version for me, not sure if this kind of file will work tho. I'll put it up anyway so please tell me if it doesn't work :p
oh sorry tagging that was an accident, sadly GMS2 doesn't allow you to export to mac, unless you have a mac device ;-; I could try and find a way around it but that might take a while, sorry about that. I'll be sure to message you (hopefully soon) when I can get a mac build tho!
I like the unique interpretation of the limitation! The game was short, but intuitive. The only thing I would say is that the platforming was a little janky, but the game was nice, well done!
thanks for the feedback! at first we were thinking of making the ammo actually infinite, but we eventually decided to try and keep ammo usage still a little more strategic. But I can see now that maybe making the tilt a little faster would be more fun, glad you enjoyed the game!
SACRIFICE! hmm... I wonder what you could do with this... guess we gotta wait and see! Get as creative as you like, and I hope you all enjoy this year's jam!