Hopefully not redundant, but a former blizzard dev is holding a Game Jam:
(by the way - he’s a good source for game development tips and inspiration. He streams almost daily at Twitch , so if you have big questions about a game and how to develop it, he’s a great resource!)
It’ll run from January 12th to January 26th. No word on the theme yet but the prizes might make it worth your time to enter if you have any time to do so, and you’ve had a burning desire in your heart to build games. He said on stream there will be 3 winning teams selected and the prizes for each winning team include (among other things):
100$ for your Steam Upload Fee to get your game up on Steam.
A Professional license of Game Maker for each member of your team.
And he did clarify on stream the Game Maker license would be a lifetime license.
I’m not big into the game production side of things, but I figured I’d highlight this here in case anybody was interested!
There are a bunch of rules associated with it, so caveat emptor and be sure to read the itch io link thoroughly, but I think it sounds like a good opportunity depending on your available time and resources.
3 teams of up to 5 people. There are other rewards but I highlighted the ones I thought would be guaranteed to be relevant here since there’s a big game dev community here.
I read all of them. My personal opinion is that these rewards are not worth the time spent by the developers. Instead of working two weeks on the game you can just work two weeks on a job and buy ten such rewards.
To be sure, the point of a game jam really shouldn’t be to “win.” Its so you, as a developer, have a problem to solve with a healthy amount of constraints that narrows your focus and allows you to test out your development skills without the luxury of time (so that you can’t really allow yourself to get too far into the weeds, to waffle on ideas, etc.). A person could do that on their own accord at any point, but that’s not really how human motivation works. Having someone say “hey, there’s a competition, here’s the rules, have fun” is usually that little bit of extra push people need to work on something.
That’s why a lot of game jams don’t have much in the way of prizes. The prize is that you, as a dev/artist/composer/etc. has contributed to a working product and are now more experienced. Also you now have a launching point for a much larger project, if you want. Its literally a situation of the destination vs the journey.
And if I can get on my soapbox for a bit, people need to SERIOUSLY internalize what I just said. I’ve recused myself from being a part of this process for all future jams (as I’m stepping away from everything WGing at the end of the year), but the perception of what jams are supposed to be within this community is largely incongruent with most other places on the web. Its why we kept harping on tighter or more confined themes, defined rules, etc., as the whole point is supposed to be to provide constraint so as to not overwhelm the devs. We’ve obviously relented on that to some degree, but it should be noted this isn’t really a “standard” direction, so to speak. And one, I would personally argue, isn’t a good direction. But, again, what I think doesn’t matter as I’ve stepped away from all of that.
And to be sure, not getting on your case @coldsteelj, more just using this as an opportunity to explain how jams usually go. We liked our prizes being larger to compensate the dev teams for their hard work, and I feel that has netted us fairly high quality submissions throughout the years.