So I’ve been looking into hosting an Itch game jam focused on kink content, and I’d like some advice.
What do I need in order to host it? I’m assuming I’d need art assets, and maybe a judging system if I want to rank them, but is there anything else I should look into? I don’t want to go into something like this underprepared.
What would be the best way to promote it? I get a bit self-conscious about promoting this sort of thing and I want to know how to go about it ethically.
What are the biggest issues an amateur game jam might suffer from?
Would it be better to do a weekend one, or a long-term one so people have more time to polish their work to a standard they like?
As someone who has participated in their fair share of game jams, I can tell you some common things I noticed.
There is a timeframe of either 2 weeks or one month. Personally I think these are good timeframes. It gives people time to brainstorm, develop, and polish a simple project, but is restrictive enough to “encourage” devs to improve quickly.
Every Jam has a theme in addition to the kink. Which puts unique restrictions on the devs to force them to think creatively. Something like why is the kink occurring, what is the kink being used for, what are they doing when the kink occurs?
There are usually three main aspects that a game is judged by. How good is the gameplay, how is the art/presentation, how closely does it follow the theme. There are other aspects (like story) that can be used, but should probably only have a minor impact on scoring.
A cash prize is usually involved. Personally, I do these for the love of the game, but it does add a bit more incentive. Since it’s an amature game jam, I would not worry about this unless you want to.
I’m not too sure about the best way to advertise it, but there is an “Advertisements” channel on the Weight Gaming discord. You might be able to drop an announcement there.
I can only answer some of these questions, but the easiest especially for this community is the length. All of the Gain Jams and last year’s Get Large jam lasted for 2 weeks, so if you want to be hosting this year’s equivalent (given there will be no Gain Jam this year) that’s what I would aim for.
Biggest issue I would say is making the theme appropriately open to interpretation. Something as broad as “stuffing” would never work because that’s 99% of the games on this site, but “game where a girls eats loads of hamburgers at a buffet” is obviously too specific. You want to strike a mid-point but also keep the theme separate from the kink. The kink is what the jam revolves around, the theme exposes how creative each entrant can be. Take a look at the themes from previous Gain Jam years for a better idea.
As for promotion (why am I answering these in reverse?), like Phryg said you can start on the Discord server. If it’s popular enough and more people get involved you might be able to get in touch with the staff for a sub-category on the site like Gain Jam > GET LARGE Jam was last year.
The timeframe seems like a good idea, I was thinking a week or two. 2-4 weeks should probably be a good idea, then.
In terms of the theme, I was thinking the kink is the theme. The whole concept of the jam is “make something unique,” since I feel like there’s a pretty high amount of Ren’Py, Twine, and RPG Maker games on the market for the games I like, and the kink usually tends to be a side thing. I guess in order to avoid overgeneralization, I might add a sub-theme or two for people to use as a guideline, but isn’t necessarily a limit.
The criteria I’m looking at are how integrated the kink is and how uniquely it’s used, the art, the general polish, and the general feel of the game. An example for the last one is Myths Are 100% True - the only inputs are an AOE attack and a dash, but the dash feels incredible since it keeps going through enemies. And dashing off slopes sends you flying through the air with all your momentum, so you can keep a really good flow going if you’re good enough.
I really want to add a cash prize, but I’ve been going through financial troubles for some time. The big thing keeping me from going through with it is my inability to offer a cash prize, since I don’t want to feel like a Kickstarter idea guy without a vision of my own.
I’ll be sure to take your advice into consideration! Hopefully I can push through my anxieties and get this off the ground at some point.
One of the primary purposes of a theme in a game jam is to make sure people aren’t just using a project they’ve been working on beforehand and enforcing the time frame of the jam. Having a more specific them also gives people a jumping off point for a project, and makes it feel like more of a unique event. I would reconsider not having a specific theme for the jam.
The big area that has the potential for mistakes is probably the judging, especially since it sounds like you want to give people a lot of time for their games (2 weeks for a jam is already quite a bit, extending it to a month might be excessive). Remember that, unless you’re doing a round of purely community judging, each judge is going to have to play through every single game, possibly multiple times to get a solid evaluation of it. If you get 20 entries that clock in at 30 minutes each (and that’s on the lower end based on past jams on this site) that’s 10 hours just to play each game, let alone do analysis for scoring.
I do kinda have a theme in mind, but the goal is less about making a game in a short time and more about just… making. I’ve noticed that a lot of games dealing with certain kinks tend to mainly just be Ren’Py VNs, RPG Maker games, and Twine text adventures - I have nothing against those, but I think more could be done with those concepts. (I do kinda want to allow people to submit existing projects as a non-judged “expo” idea, kinda like what the Sonic Hacking Contest does.)
Basically, I want to have a primary theme focused on a specific kink, and a few sub-themes that don’t have to be followed, but can certainly give bonus points. One of the most popular rhythm games of the past decade was initially a game jam game that didn’t entirely fit the jam’s theme, and I don’t mind making the sub-themes flexible as long as people get to be more creative.
That pretty much defeats the purpose of a jam. If there’s no community competition to see who can work best with the theme, cash prize or not, interest will be severely lessened. Allowing existing projects to be submitted will deter people from starting anything new because they won’t be able to compete. If you want to just create an expo, create an expo. You can’t have both at the same time. The logistics of knowing which games to exclude from judging would be complicated, not to mention the inevitable cheating from people submitting existing projects as actual jam entries.
The reason why those game engines get used a bunch is because they’re the easiest to learn, and the vast majority of devs here are trying out game dev for the first time. If by “more” you mean “make it more complex and also 3D”, you’re not going to get that with 2 weeks of development. You’ll instead just see more of those shorter, simpler games due to the time restriction, and the jam to full game conversion ratio is notoriously pretty small.
And again with the theme: creativity is borne from limitations, not from making the goal as wide as possible. If you ask a bunch of people “just make something”, you’ll get a wide array of entries that will be impossible to properly judge. Could you honestly and accurately judge The Weighting Game against Apostles against The Snackrooms? All of them feature weight gain, but all in different ways and all in different genres. Jams have themes to give a common link to all of the entries, forcing the developers to get creative in how they implement said theme. Requiring a kink to be involved is too broad to work like that, just look at the variety of games on this site.
Gotcha, I’ll try to lean more into the themes, then. I already have a couple themes in mind, just not sure which one to focus on.
In response to the second paragraph - I’m not expecting people to go crazy with it, I’m mainly just expecting something more than just “very obvious RPG Maker game.” I’m not excluding stuff from those engines, but I’m hoping to see people put more effort into them - stuff like Dungeon of the Devourer has some pretty clear effort put into it, as seen by the custom talk and battle sprites, I do like how BE Grove and Galactase use Ren’Py for more than just visual novels, and RoanneTheWolf uses Twine in some pretty neat ways. While I don’t want to block the use of these engines entirely, I want to encourage people to make games with more unique elements. (Plus, Godot has a bit of an easier point of entry than something like RPG Maker due to being free.)
Part of the issue is that most people are not programmers. it takes time to learn languages and so you’ll end up with alot of games that play exactly the same even if alot of effort is put into them. For example renpy games can have pygames added to them and play inside them. I think ive only seen one other person do it.