itch.io

Thanks for participating! Really impressed seeing some of the stuff people have put out in only 7 days, even if some needed a fair bit of bug fixing afterwards. It's been a real privilege hosting this jam and I'm happy people enjoyed it and managed to make stuff for it. Hope to see you again next year!

Because if there's anything that makes an entertaining livestream, it's 100+ short and under-scoped timewasters.

I was using a prediction, 1:10, standard for 1-week jams like this. Problem is I didn't account properly for audience, since a jam with a pre-existing audience of this size is (obviously now, but I guess hindsight is 20/20) going to have a higher submission rate, which it did, and that's my bad.

To be honest, the voting period was going to be this long either way. We have 10 judges and 129 entries, and finding new judges that are trustworthy enough in this case is extremely difficult. Only real effect of not quite being ready for the amount of entries is that I keep having to push the end date back to adjust for it. This should be the final delay as some of the judges are starting to make extremely quick progress.

me looking at my itch notifications 10 minutes before voting starts to see 100+ new submissions (we were only expecting like 50)

Voting period has been extended another week.

Hey, so the judge team has some concerns with the pufferfish "augh" sound being used here. Apparently YouTube auto-flags videos with that sound for animal abuse now, which as you can imagine would cause vod problems. Any chance you could upload a build with that sound replaced?

Yeah, go ahead and push the update.

same!!!!

As-long as the bug fixes are just bug fixes, not significant gameplay changes or additions, you're fine to push the update. With the warning, it's probably a good idea to add one based on the description of the effect.

Voting is judges-only.

If the game is already submitted, you can update it without re-submitting.

If the game is already submitted, you can update it without re-submitting.

https://itch.io/jam/388790/add-game/3107410/3175610?token=oDTAGhkbyvLAW4IiY1XcKY...

If you're game is already up and submitted, you can just update the download.

Jam timing can be awkward, so if you didn't quite finish your entry in-time, put the link to your game page here and I'll send you a link to submit it late! I'll update this message when the late-submit window is up.

The late submission window is now closed. Sorry if you didn't manage to submit in-time.

https://itch.io/jam/388790/add-game/3107445/3175610?token=GeP8iO4spmrlbGta8Tyuki...

https://itch.io/jam/388790/add-game/3107456/3175610?token=Wz80HXltlXjCBGq3RXtuN4...

https://itch.io/jam/388790/add-game/3107442/3175610?token=D0pGmOJaFj5zvQfHCDT9sO...

Yep, fixing major bugs is the whole reason updates are allowed at-all. Had a Crust Jam 2024 submission that, on every computer but the developer's, crashed trying to display a splash screen, and they didn't realize until voting period start (had to temporarily enable updates for them).

https://itch.io/jam/388790/add-game/3105486/3175610?token=42TvVUQmyVi4kRAQtojiBH...

https://itch.io/jam/388790/add-game/3107475/3175610?token=UOUX2v3fo5QCtNnwq6k9ua...

https://itch.io/jam/388790/add-game/3107407/3175610?token=TYXMQQHNqWN5whVBHmvFmU...

As-long as the web build is overall the same as the windows build, yes.

Heads-up, you've only got a mac download available meaning the submission breaks rule 3. If a Windows build isn't available by  the start of the voting period It'll unfortunately have to be disqualified.

Ah, ok. Thanks for elaborating!

How does this fit the jam's theme? Me and the mod team are struggling to figure it out.

Any skill level, any size, doesn't really matter! Jams like this are a way to practice and get feedback. Submitting anything at-all shows you're willing to put the effort into making something, get it out there and learn from the experience.

It actually WAS going to be Meat but we decided to change it partially for that reason.

Not against the rules, but it would be an extremely bad idea. You would 100% stretch yourself way too thin, causing both projects to end up worse-off because of it. Just put your all into a single project.

Only the person who is posting the game needs to sign up, so no.

I'd say voice clips from stream are regarded as public domain or fair use in this case, so there's no issue there.

In-terms of things like characters, designs and names, those are more abstract concepts than actual game-used assets like models and sprites, meaning they're considered beyond the scope of the rule and are allowed. Basically, if you make a Scoot, you can add a Scoot.

The asset rules will probably be made less strict if we do another one of these jams, just keeping things a little restrictive for now to make things easier on the mod/judge team while they get used to the whole game jam thing.

The assets still need to be looked for, not to mention they're at-least made by human people. Those other assets also need to have any licenses or conditions followed, such as payment, attribution, whatever. Plus we're heavily encouraging doing as much yourself as possible. If we completely banned any and all outside assets, it would block the use of stock sound effect, font and texture libraries, a dealbreaker for 99% of people. Seeing as we're allowing teams, people who are missing the skills needed for certain aspects can always team up with people who do have those skills, so really we're giving as little reason to use more than a couple outside assets as possible here.

Now seeing as you supposedly don't plan on using AI in your own submission, I don't see why you insist on wasting both yours and my time nitpicking the asset rules. If "don't use a bunch of AI-generated trash in your game" is too big of an ask for someone, they shouldn't be joining a game jam, they should be watching some tutorials and learning some actual creative skills. I already changed the rule to be more lenient than I'd ideally like, I'm not changing it again.

If something is on an asset store or is a stock asset, it's fine to use (if it's a paid asset you need to have bought it). If it's public domain then it's all good. If it has a creative commons license then just follow the terms of the license and you should be good to go. Main thing is don't use anything copyrighted, stolen, or ripped from other games. Existing chunks of generic code not specifically made for your submission, like dialogue systems and player controllers, are fine to use.

With all that being said, it's encouraged to do as much as you can yourself and within the submission period if you're able.

AI makes it easier to shart out complete slop without even having to steal anything. At-least when you're cobbling slop together out of stock images and asset packs you need to actually go out of your way to find things, with AI you just tell it to generate what you want. People are going to submit crappy slop games anyway, but disallowing the use of AI assets at-least raises the minimum effort a little.

If your entire issue is banning the "tasteful" use of AI (drag-dropping stream jokes that just happen to have been made using ai into the game with no modification whatsoever) then this new version of the rule, "None of the original assets made for your submission can be AI-Generated", should be satisfactory.

If you really just want to AI-generate half of the assets in your submission, this isn't the jam for you.

Alright then, how would you want to see it worded? Reminder that some sort of anti-AI rule needs to be in-place to uphold general quality standards and prevent low-effort ai-generated slop games from flooding the jam.

Game jams are for people to show of their own skills. There's no problem with using AI-generated stuff as reference for your own work, but just outright slapping AI-generated assets in your submission defeats the point of a game jam. I do agree that the wording of the rule is somewhat strict and will update it, however direct, unmodified use of AI-Generated content will still not be allowed.

The reason for the web-only rule is that, during the Crust Jam 2024 stream, there were a lot of issues with certain Unity and Python games refusing to run. After some thinking, I feel like I can just add a few rules to deal with that and remove the web build requirement.

For anyone who can't download this one, go into Windows Defender and allow the Wacatac "Trojan" that it pops up with, then restart the download. Windows Defender almost always gives a false-positive for Wacatac in packaged Python scripts, which as a Python developer myself, is extremely annoying.