libGDX Jam - IT'S HAPPENING GUYS!

[mzechner]

THE JAM IS ON!

Hi there,

i'm considering setting up a game jam for libGDX folks. Since that's a considerable effort on my part, i wanted to test the waters by polling people first.

The jam format will be 1 week of theme voting, 4 weeks of jamming (solo or team, whatever you prefer), 2 days submission and one week of judging, either by the community or by a jury. Games will have to be written from scratch, using libGDX, either with your own art assets, or 3rd party assets. Bonus points for making it OSS.

While 4 weeks of jaming sounds extensive, there's a reason behind that time frame. I want as many as possible to participate. A 48h time frame is to little for most people, as everyone has other stuff to do. 4 weeks allows more people to participate, even if the overall scope of most games will only be within the 48h format.

I also want to motivate people with prizes. Ideally i can find sponsors so every participant gets a nice shirt. In the best case, i may find sponsors for devices/dev machines for the best 3 entries.

Now, as i said, that's a considerable effort on my part, so i'd like to gauge community interest before doing that. Any libGDX user on here, please vote

https://twitter.com/badlogicgames/statu ... 1834725376

Good time to sign up for Twitter :p

[Serapth]

Shoot me a tweet or mail when you've got the promo materiel/blog/announce/whatever up and I will also announce on gamefromscratch.

I don't believe I will be participating though, that is my traditional family early christmas trip time... perhaps they wont mind if I brought a laptop...

[Magnesus]

"written from scratch" means no use of libraries that we might have already written internally?

[Czyzby]

(...) either with your own art assets, or 3rd party assets.

It would be nice if you could use free assets from sources like opengameart.org, I'm pretty sure it would make more people willing to join (yes, including me ; )). Especially in case of small teams or just a single LibGDX programmer with no artistic talent whatsoever.

"written from scratch" means no use of libraries that we might have already written internally?

Usually there are no rules against using tools made before the jam (including your own), as long as they are, well, just tools. Especially if your libraries are public (and possibly available through Maven Central).

Will it be possible to submit multiple entries? (Of course, I'm not talking about a flood of Flappy Bird clones, each with different graphics.)

[mzechner]

Still figuring out the rules. Here's my proposal.

Theme
Submissions must meet the theme that the community will chose from. We are currently generating theme ideas here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... S869Q/edit. We'll select the best 5 themes from that list, then have the community vote on the final theme one week before the jam starts.

Asssets
Use whatever you can find, be it something you created from scratch, or something from freesound.org or opengameart. Since we will jam around a theme, i suspect this gives no unfair advantage to anyone anyways.

Code
Use of libraries like gdx-ai, gdx-pay, Ashley or other 3rd party libs is absolutely allowed. Use of tools like Tiled, Overlap2D, etc. is absolutely allowed. Code you've written before is allowed.

What is NOT allowed is reskinning a pre-existing game! We can't really prove that, so that's a loophole we'll have to live with.

Prizes & Voting
RoboVM and Robotality are sponsoring prices. The former sponsors devices (mac mini, ipad, ipod touch] the latter are sponsoring 20 steam keys for Halfway. Our partner itch.io is providing us with a super fancy game jam system that allows voting, which is a lot of work on their end already.

After the jam period of 4 weeks, we'll have 1 week of voting on itch.io. The winner of that community vote will get the mac mini. The ipad and ipod will be awarded to the participants that 1) submitted an entry and 2) documented their development the most in a dev log and on twitter, using tags that promote our sponsors (RoboVM, Robotality and itch.io). The dev logs will all be gathered in a single thread here on the forum. The tweets should be of the form "New screeny of my #libGDXJam game. Progress! @robotality @robovm", or "New dev log entry for my #libGDXJam game @robovm @robotality".

The Halfway keys will be awarded to 20 random submissions.

I want it to work this way to fulfill 3 goals:
1. The community has a say who gets the biggest prize, so people will aim for quality
2. Everyone has a chance to win something, regardless of their skill
3. We want to make noise about libGDX, the jam and the sponsors on the web

Does this make sense?

[jimthev]

I hope you can get t-shirts for completed entries. My son still constantly wears his original VRJam shirt. Even if you don't, we still enter because it is fun and these contests provide a framework to get something created (he designs the game and finds resources, I implement it). We've talked about a couple ideas before but never seem to take the time to do them. We did received a small computer for the last one we did (Intel RealSense), but honestly the t-shirts from the VRJam are worth more to us.

I like the random prizes since that gives us a better chance of winning something! I think you should limit entries to one per person. Also, I agree that between school and work, 4 weeks real time is actually a 48h scope for us.

[mzechner]

I'm afraid i couldn't get the sponsors to help out with t-shirts. I think i'll invest some of my own money to sponsor 20 or so shirts, and give them to the first 20 folks by community voting. I'm sure i can find 2 extra for you and your son

[siondream]

Asssets
Use whatever you can find...

... Complying with the license. I know it goes without saying but we should be explicit.

Code

This is a lot more flexible than Ludum Dare for instance, where all pre-existing codebases need to be made available and you can only use freely available tools.

Prizes & Voting

Agree with everything. The public voting will be the most sought after prize, gives you street rep! Whilst everyone can get something, even out of luck. T-shirts would be awesome. Do we have any money from Patreon we could invest in that?

I would advise to explicitly say that teams are allowed.

[jimthev]

Maybe you could put up a donation page somewhere. I'd donate something to help provide more people with shirts. I know how hard it is to finish that final 10% of a project and I respect everybody that completes their entry, even if the final version sometimes doesn't live up to the original vision.

[mzechner]

siondream, agree with everything, will put your suggestions in the final rule sheet.

Jimthev, that's an interesting idea. We are looking at about $20-30/shirt (including international shipping). If we have 100-200 people participating, we are looking at quite the sum. I don't think we'll get that through donations (which would have to be taxed, which already makes my life hard in the patreon case...). I'll buy 22 shirts myself and send them out, if someone wants to buy additional shirts and do shipping, ping me at mario at badlogicgames dot com.

Oh, and there's really no "finished" entries. Just submitted entries