The GOL Game Jam Is Really Happening Soon!

Recently I asked some opinions about us organizing a game jam here on GOL and I received a bunch of positive feedback and I will consider that a green light to go ahead with our plans. The event will hopefully launch on October 19th.

There were all kinds of recommendations and suggestions related to rules, time span, group sizes and allowed tools and I have tried to take the feedback into account while creating the basic set of rules for our game jam. I also gathered plenty of opinions from our IRC channel and incorporated that to the plan.

We will be using itch.io to host the game jam because they already have a game jam platform we can use. It's an all-in-one solution and works quite nicely for our purposes. In addition to hosting the submitted games, we will also use the page to rate the games and by “we” I mean the community. Yes, you will get to decide the winner, no editorial jury here. The games will be rated based on a couple of simple categories (gameplay, visuals, sound, performance) and after the voting period is done we will hopefully have come up with a winner.

We had some varying opinions about the length of the event but I decided that it would be nearly impossible to do the event properly in a single weekend so I decided on a one week development / submission period. The submissions will be open right from the beginning of the event and they will close after one week has passed. After that the voting period will begin and people will get to test and rate all the submitted games. Voting will also last one whole week.

As for the rules, based on the feedback I created the following basic set of rules:

1. The game must run natively on Linux in some kind of executable form (no Wine or DOSBox)
2. You may team up or make a game on your own
3. Your game can use pre-made engines
4. The use of pre-made assets is allowed but restricted to assets that anyone can obtain and use
5. You may not use a full game as a template for your game, the game should be designed by you
6. You can license your game under a license of your liking but the use of open licenses is encouraged (GPL, MIT, BSD, etc)

You might have noticed that I removed the requirement that the game must be developed on Linux. So if you want to write the game on Windows with something like Unity3D you are free to do so. I was also not quite sure how to deal with pre-made content such as music, graphics and models but I eventually decided to allow their use provided they can be obtained and used by anyone legally. Note that this does restrict the use of assets you have made yourself privately before the beginning of the jam, unless you made those assets publicly available. If you do use pre-made assets make sure you are also aware of potential licensing issues and if you can, please make a list the creators and the origins of the assets used.

The idea of themes was also a difficult choice and the opinions were also a bit divided. Thus this event will have an optional theme that you can decide to follow if you so desire but there won't be any penalty for not doing so. The theme will be announced at the beginning of the game jam.

I also concluded that the best prize for the winner would be free publicity. We will feature a couple of the highest rated games on GOL and the winner will get a traditional text interview. They can use this chance to talk a bit about their current projects. Everyone loves promotion, am I right?

Hopefully this plan is not completely terrible and will make for an enjoyable jam experience. Make sure to use the time before the jam to set up your game development environment so that you don't need to waste precious development time on that. If you have questions regarding the jam, make sure to leave your questions in the comments or send me a message on IRC, email or in a private message and I'll try my best to come up with an answer that makes sense. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.