We’ll host a new Godot Community Game Jam next week-end, from Friday 15 June to Monday 18 June, see the itch.io jam page.
It’s been a loooong time since our previous one in December 2016, and the community has changed a lot since then, so we’re thrilled to see what you will make!
Propose themes
We’d like to have a theme for the jam, as many of us benefit from having a specific constraint to feed their creativity :)
But for this we’d like to gather your suggestions for what would be an inspiring theme. Head over to this online poll, or answer it below:
This poll is only for proposals and not the final vote, but you can “like” proposals made by others to help us filter the most interesting ones. We’ll then make another poll on Tuesday 12 to select the final theme.
Why only now?
The reason for the gap since our last jam is that 2017 was our big 3.0 development year, and we wanted to wait for a usable build of Godot 3.0 before making a new jam (otherwise users would be encouraged to use Godot 2.1 and produce games not compatible with Godot 3). But stabilizing Godot 3 took time, and most of our focus away from organizing a jam, so nothing happened on this front.
Then 3.0 was released, a lot of backlog had to be worked on post-release, and the jam was delayed again…
But better late than never, now that Godot 3.0 is well established (with the maintenance version 3.0.3 likely coming in time for the jam) it’s time for a new Godot-focused game jam to see what the community is up to!
Shorter jams, more often
If you’re not familiar with our previous Godot jams, they used to run for a whole month (or even more for the last one).
This was nice to give everyone a chance to participate, be it with an entry worked on during the whole month or only during one free week-end. But at the same time many jammers prefer the shorter variant, focusing on a game for one week-end and moving on to something else, so we’ll give this formula a try this time. We’ll gather your feedback and see if you liked it this way or if we should adapt the format again for the next one.
As the community has grown a lot since 2016, we’d also like to propose jams more regularly - how often is yet to be determined based on your feedback, but every 3 months sounds like a good pace a priori.
Rules
The rules will be quite simple and similar to that of our previous jams, especially the requirement for all submissions to be free and open source. More details on this in the coming days as we flesh out the itch.io jam page and write the theme voting announcement.
We might even have some small prizes for the winners, stay tuned! :)
Livestreams with Juan Linietsky and more
It’s not related to the upcoming jam, but while you wait for the theme to be revealed, don’t miss the livestreams organized by Ben Tristem of GameDev.TV with our very own Juan Linietsky (today at 20:00 UTC on YouTube) and many others (see the full line up, dates and stream links).