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Please add an option for game jams' participants to opt out of some of the ranking categories

A topic by Aeon Felis created Oct 19, 2023 Views: 137
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Similar suggestion from 5 years ago: https://itch.io/t/176920/category-opt-out-feature-for-game-jams

Premade third party assets are a controversial topic in game jams.

On the one hand, some teams (and individuals) don't have artists/composers that can dedicate themselves to the assets. Third party assets allow them to participate without sacrificing precious time on low quality art.

On the other hand, games are not judged on gameplay alone - visuals and sound are also important factors. It is not fair that artists and composers that labored on the assets during the jam's limited time have to compete with asset packages that made by non-participants who had much more time and leisure to work on them.

The suggested compromise is to allow these games to opt out of judgement criteria that they didn't make themselves. A jam's rules would specify that you can use third party assets, but you'll have to mark it when you submit your game to the jam so that during the ranking period, the relevant category for your game will be grayed out. That way teams without artists/composers could still participate, without having their third party visuals and audio compete with the visuals and audio of other games that were made by actual team members.

This, of course, requires support from the platform that host the jam - hence a feature request.