Coding does not count towards the word count.

For Ren’Py VN’s, if someone accuses you of being under 2,000 words or circumventing the requirement, we can easily use a function to count how many words of dialogue there are along with adding up the number of times characters’ names are being displayed.

For other engines, if someone accuses you of being under 2,000 words or circumventing the requirement, an Administrator will play the VN and manually count the number of words.

Remember that you are innocent until proven guilty in these scenarios.

No, they do not have to be the one that stands out more than every other character in the game. That would be too subjective to enforce.

They do need to “be a prominent character—protagonist NOT included—to the overall narrative for the majority of the story” as in you can’t just have a wolf set off the events of the story for them not be involved for the rest of it. They need to be important to the plot.

IP means Intellectual Property.

In the context of this Jam, it means a story and characters that came from someone’s mind.

For example, my Non-Jam VN IBWHIP, is my own Intellectual Property because I made it up.

The ever-famous Adastra Series is Howly and HAPS’s IP that they own.