I’m fully willing to be wrong here, honestly the proof will be in how many entries there are.
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an extension would be cool but an extension only till Monday is the worst possible thing for me due to school projects being due that day. If the jam ended on Friday I would have the weekend if the jam was extended 1 week I would have time. If it is extended to Monday it is a Non-Extension of the jam for me. I would love to polish the game over two more weeks. I don’t see why people are upset about any extension, you should have a close to finished game by now you don’t have to crunch for 2 more weeks to finish a 75-90% finished game. 1 to 2 weeks means finish game and squash some bugs or add in mechanics that got dropped due to time. Complaining about a gift doesn’t make sense to me. (Though an extension to the 4th is not a gift for me due to IRL stuff, which I need to do.)
Of those dissatisfied with theme, I do want to ask what would you want to see in a game jam theme? The theme itself was developed internally, but it was reinforced by a random game jam generator as we were spitballing ideas. This random theme the game jam generator made was one that’s meant for a typical length of time (48 hours), and has the hallmarks of a typical jam theme. Something different that weeds out existing projects, and vague enough that people can have fun with it. All we ultimately did was slap some rules lawyering on it as we stepped through how it could be abused, and it lined up with one we already had come up with ourselves.
So in terms of themes, this was literally as typical of a jam theme as it gets since we basically borrowed it. So what we need to know why this theme fails (if you believe it does), and what we can do next time to avoid this issue. The admin team is composed of two career programmers, and one author, so what seems straight forward to us isn’t always clear, and the nature of the jam theme omits it from being tested against a focus group, so our perspective is really all we have.
This. Having to wait longer hurts, but if it means more games and more time for the devs, I’m all for it.
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This jam has 2 themes at all times though. The random theme and fetishes (which is a scoring topic so it can’t be ignored [story is also a scoring topic as well which means for a best score you need a story even if you game is more mechanic based])
That being said, I can’t speak for any devs. I’m a writer myself, and not a developer. I’ve worked under tight deadlines, and gotten sudden extensions as well. I think the most important thing is to have an idea in mind, and develop it until your satisfied with it. Getting an extension doesn’t mean you have to upscale your work as a result. Don’t feel pressured to create something bigger because you’ve got more time.
That’s just my two cents, don’t mean to step on anybody’s toes here.
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I think you should stick to your guns as far as the themes go, A short challenge is what most devs who are entering these are expecting, even if the turn out is a little over ten entries, quantity =/= quality. let it end and use whatever data you can take from the turnout next year, if hard themes prove too much for the community you’ll naturally come to the conclusion that way.
The only suggestion I’d make to this theme or the themes in general is to leave them as a prompt instead of adding rules, for example if you simply left it as hands off, some people would have taken it to make games with minimal input and some people would maybe tie it in visually or through writing, then you would maybe get a bigger pool of games to judge and the judges could then choose for themselves who used it most creatively. Its something i see in a lot of the jam devlogs i watch.
I personally like mechanics forced on me but i understand that not everyone will, at the same time i even dislike when the theme affects the setting and story more so what i mention above might be a good catch-all.
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At this point I don’t really want to agonize over this any longer. Suffice to say the overlying issue with the theme is accessibility.
If you think this theme is reasonable to push on this community then by all means do so. But this jam doesn’t measure up to the last few then the answer will more or less be obvious.
I’m happy to talk directly about it, but I fear I’m getting a bit to heated and don’t want to push it further.
To be sure, my intent is not to antagonize, we legitimately want to know what people would want out of a theme, and by extension, the jam. And it comes back to a question that was levied earlier in the thread, which is “what is the goal of the jam.” This question is imperative, as its lies on a spectrum of: challenge the devs to hone their skills -or- make more games for the community."
This balance is most well achieved by tuning the theme’s difficulty. This year’s theme was definitely on the side of challenge the devs, and its possible we took it too far. We’ve seen the insane stuff the community has done, and that could have possibly blinded us to what a newcomer would see coming up against it.
I’m not throwing the ball back to you to force out an answer; we direct the jams and the community as a whole based on feedback, so honest feedback is important to us. I wouldn’t be spending so much time in this thread and elsewhere if that were not the case, and I hope I’ve at least earned enough trust over the years for people to know that both I and the rest of the admin team listen to all the feedback we receive.
This role, administration, is customer service at the end of the day. And I take it as a personal failure when members of the community are dissatisfied with our performance. The only way we get better is by hearing what you all have to say.
Thanks.
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Thank you, this is extremely helpful feedback.
With all due respect to yourself, this is a misread of the theme I am sorry to say. You can have direct control of a character, just not have them be the only character in the game. To quote Grot:
When you think of games in where you are guiding or protecting an NPC, like in an escort mission, I’m sure you can appreciate that the action game genre can indeed fit the theme.
Unfortunately this hasn’t been the first instance of a misinterpretation of this theme, and yet the rules do make it clear, so it’s tricky to draw a clear fault here. Some post-Jam feedback about the theme and developer expectations when entering the Jam will hopefully be illuminating.
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That part I did understand, but the implication is that even if you have full control over a character you still can’t directly interact with any other characters. I actually did think of an escort mission, but I still ruled it out because fighting enemies directly or physically pulling the character you’re escorting where they need to go all seemed to go against the theme.
Maybe I was looking at it too literally, but I interpreted “the player or player character can not directly interact with or control other characters” to mean that there must always be a gap between the player’s actions and the effect on any other characters within the game. So if there’s enemies in your game you can’t press a button to swing a sword or whatever to damage them, instead you have to place some sort of hazard in their way and wait for that deal with them. Technically that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to make an action game, but I figured that separation would just make it far more difficult to make an action game that’s actually fun to play, and so I decided it wasn’t worth trying at all.
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My personal problem with the theme, and I can’t imagine I’m the only one, is that I still don’t fully understand it. Like I get it in theory but in practice I have no clue.
I’ve read the theme’s rules like 20 times and still don’t know fully what’s allowed and what isn’t. I’ve had the rules quoted at me to try and prove or explain points and it still doesn’t make sense. Providing example games might have helped, or including concepts that wouldn’t break the rules would have been nice. But either I’m a massive moron, which is likely, or this concept is for people way more experienced than I am.
Secondly from a practical stand point hands off honestly can be sort of Fetish counter. Stuffing and feeding are big parts of the fetish that kind of get cut off when we talk about hands off game play. Maybe someone can find a way to make it work, I have no idea how.
To my understanding of the rules VN’s effectively can’t exist so you’ve really hit hard against people with a writing focus. Then using RPG maker is pretty rough because you’d have to find a way to either use it in a way it’s not supposed to be used, or you would have to do what Nick Sav did and be on the borderline of breaking the rules to make a game.
Then when I look at the people who really enjoy the theme, for the most part they look to be the more experienced devs who have done more complex projects in the past. Which is fine, but when I think of what I loved about last game jam, it was how many new people created projects who would have never done one were it not for the jam.
Maybe I’m alone, I can’t say for sure. Judging by what I’ve seen some others say I could be the minority. All I know is that I’ll be very sad if we have less than 20 entries this time around.
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Oddly enough I had the exact opposite thought in terms of difficulty of the theme, I thought that people who are focused on writing like me would have an EASIER time with this subject.
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I felt that this is a pretty creative theme that’d have some interesting things come out of it and have no objections to an extension. Of course I’m not developing a game for it, so I don’t have that same level of investment of whether or not it feels unfair to do so.
So as someone who helped design and create a game for last year’s entry with very little development and game writing experience I’ll share my two-bits. I think this was indeed a very interesting theme, and I think it did have a lot of potential. But I personally prefer themes that introduce a concept, such as last year’s work theme, because it serves as a source of inspiration by forcing a creator to come up with a game that fits the setting. This theme was too broad I believe. I think “Hands off” is a very fun idea but it doesn’t personally me any sort of inspiration as to what kind of game or characters I’ll have. This may be because I’ve got a writers perspective though, as back when I worked on my teams game “Throw your weight around” I was able to come up the setting and storyline because the prompt gave me inspiration, and then our programmer was able to build mechanics around my initial ideas
TL:DR: A mechanic-based theme seems too broad for my novice writer brain, and I personally prefer a prompt-based theme
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This actually. Writing is more in my wheelhouse and a mechanic-based topic kinda throws me a bit, and I’m drawn towards games that are more writing focused (SFOAS, Breakfast Chub, Kobold Kommandos to name some of my faves)
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Maybe there is a case for sticking to more (for want of a better word) “thematic” themes, such as holidays, workplaces etc. Situation-based themes instead of more mechanical ones…
… Then again, people have also been very much in favour of the current theme as well. It always comes back round to the old adage of not being able to please everyone, alas. 
A post-Jam feedback survey should be able to give a measure of what the community wants from the Jam so that the admins can pick up on any prevailing undercurrents and hopefully improve the experience for next time.
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To put my own two cents in, I do have to agree that the themes so far offered both inspiration and some sort of mold to fit into.
The immediate inspiration I got from this theme was a ghost haunting game of sorts, but that was apparently not really allowed and coupled with the winter semester starting during the jam I just decided to not really bother.
I do think this theme is interesting, but I am not sure how easily it fits with the unspoken kink theme this page expects. I am for sure looking forward to a post Jam survey of sorts, as this is an interesting occasion for sure.
One of my first thoughts when the theme was announced was anticipating some ghost or poltergeist characters (I mean, you can’t get more “hands-off” than the incorporeal, heheh 
), especially given Halloween being right round the corner.
I’m curious what is meant by “not allowed” here. I’ve said this before but it bears repeating: outside of flagrant disregard of it, there is no hard “correct” way to interpret the theme. If you believe that an idea fits the brief then you use your game to convey your convictions to the judges as best you can. An idea that may not sound theme-appropriate at first blush may well be vindicated in its execution, which is ultimately what the judging will pick up on.
Even if the judges disagree with an interpretation of the theme then - again, outside of blatantly ignoring the theme altogether - the worst you’ll lose is points in that particular category. At this juncture no one is looking to disbar entries.