As most of you may know the end of this years Jam is coming up! Unfortunately it seems the theme this year may have been a bit more of a curve ball then we expected, and we are hearing from a fair number of devs that September just proved to be very busy for them giving them less time to work on their games then they wanted.
Due to this and the stress we are seeing among some of the devs we are considering extending the Jam Deadline by 1 or 2 weeks. We are not sure which option we will go with yet so we wanted to put a poll out to get feedback from the general community. We will let the poll run until tomorrow after which we will use it and the feedback we got from a small handful of devs we directly contacted to figure out how long we should extend the Jam.
While I do approve of an extension, I feel like doubling Jam duration with the two week option when we are already over halfway done with the jam is a bit excessive. I would be happy with the extension to Monday, alright with a full week extension but honestly I can’t keep grinding on game dev for a full extra two weeks.
I’m cool with a couple days extension. But I moved several obligation from these two weeks, to the upcoming two weeks so I wouldn’t be able to take advantage of any additional time.
There should be no extension. It is supremely unfair to folks that planned out a game that is designed to be made in two weeks and then you double the time. If somebody needs that extra two weeks, then they poorly planned and deserve to not have a finished game.
I think that the extension to Monday is the better idea here. Weekend means that most people would be able to take advantage of it, without overextending the deadline.
An extension of one week is already a 50% increase in length for the jam, which is massive by any other game jam’s standards. A 2-week extension makes this a one-month jam, which would make it not a jam at all. Plenty of games here have been made in less than that amount of time outside of a game jam.
I would like everyone to keep in mind that if you’ve already submitted a game and we do extend the deadline, you can use this extra time to polish or add extra features, as we accept updates to all submissions until the deadline.
The deadline has already been extended to Monday, this is a poll to gather feedback on extending it another week or two, just to be clear.
To respond here since the discord is making some of the same points. I can see a few day extension but the problem with it is we can not end it on a weekday as we need to monitor the servers when we close the jam and our day jobs will interfere with that so we need to end it on a weekend for practical purposes.
The week/2 week extension is definitely not fair competitively since most people who have entered so far did it with the 2 week limit in mind and maybe scheduled accordingly, the extension favors people who are able to sink time.
However from a content standpoint the extra weeks can only end in better stuff (if devs use it), an option for 2 days or whatever would be good for at the least an idea of where the community stands but if it has to be between 1 and 2 weeks might as well go all out, even if its not quite a jam anymore.
Thats a fair point. We may need to consider some alterations to the scoring system to go with the extension to take account that fact and try to offset it some.
In terms of extension I full on agree with the sentiment that it should just end Monday if it’s going to be extended at all but honestly it shouldn’t be extended.
You guys made a hard theme presumably to prevent as many submissions as there were in the last game jam. Which on the one hand I understand but on the other, you guys knee capped the creators before it even started.
You introduced a stupidly high concept theme to a group of either first time developers or part time developers. If you didn’t see this coming then now is definitely a time to learn for when we do this again.
I mean fuck, you could have made the theme Weight Management, with an emphasis on managing resources. This would have been close-ish to your current theme while being infinitely more approachable while at the same time weeding out cookie cutter RPG’s.
I’ve been a very vocal supporter for a long time but tbh, this is the first time I’ve been disappointed in the management team as a whole. Which sucks because I love all of you and this community.
Thank you so much for your insights on this. We greatly value the feedback on this and are sorry we failed to meet expectations on this one. Our intent is to challenge devs and we just over estimated this theme.
We hope at least we will be able to learn from this and the feedback we get from all of you really helps us with that.
You know it’s funny, literally just a few hours before the first extension was announced, I was thinking to myself, “Man, this theme is kinda rough, not sure how much more I can finish before the deadline. I wonder how everyone else is doing”.
I guess this one has been a lot tougher than expected huh?
