I agree. Unless there’s no limit on the amount in what’s considered “a team”. Is there a limit to the amount of people to a group?
I would say… it’s more of an industry than a community.
Game Jams are an essential part of the Indie Game lifecycle.
You’d be surprised how many popular games started as weekend experiments.
- Titan Souls
- Celeste
- Baba is You
- Surgeon Simulator
- Superhot
- Inscryption
- Goat Simulator
- Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes
- Forager
- Towerfall
- Don’t Starve
(WTF Offling, I’ve never heard of any of these games… You’re too deep in indie shit)
Double Fine (big studio) even runs an annual game jam internally to decide their next project:
It’s a huge part of the industry, and a great process.
PLUS, IT IS FUN
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He’s talking about funds for the jam organizer(s), not the team organizers.
Team organizers are team members, there’s no “team managers” in this process…
There is also no limit to team size.
Though, the prize for winning team is split amongst the members.
Self-manage thusly.
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What do you think is a good prizepool, then?
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I think what brennen mentioned for an increase is fair. It’s hard to really say what value should be placed but the amount of work I see or hear people are putting into developing resources for wagdie I feel like that effort could be centralized in a way where there could be just a few large groups of people to ensure that the resources aren’t spread too thin.
But I think having an increased pool will allow others to join the groups and participate just to help to ensure others have what’s necessary in a timeline that allows greater impact.
Seeing a possible outreach to some other devs to come in would require it worth their time. Like I know of (not well) the dev of @isotile who is making their own metaverse. I bet they could be extremely beneficial to what their skill set could be. But would need it worth their efforts.
Another thing I think ought be mentioned since I’m getting the picture that most of you are quite a bit further away from game dev central than I ought to have guessed, but…
THESE WILL BE VERY SMALL GAMES
Even very talented developers who have tons of experience with this kind of pressure cooker are only capable of delivering short games with a few mechanics and they’re usually still pretty buggy. A week is not a long time, especially for newly formed teams, so keep those expectations in check.
You’re looking at a 10-30 minute experience tops, with a lot of placeholder graphics, limited mechanics, and such. These are roughs, prototypes, proof of concepts.
Do not expect much of the final products, but do expect a nice collection of seeds we can later plant and water.
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I’ve heard of a couple at least 
… Been playing Don’t Starve quite a bit recently.
Noted on the expected output. I assume the winner or otherwise that gain traction can be further developed via additional proposal.
Yah, that’s part of the thinking here.
Jam produces a bunch of game seeds, we can follow up with extra proposals for the best ones.
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I think the idea is awesome. I particularly participated in a lot of gamejams (mostly with a monthly deadline, because kids hahaha) and I say it’s the most efficient way to pivot good ideas, especially in game design.
Apart from that, we could get a lot of talent that is outside of wagdie today.
And particularly, in the end I would participate with some tiny idea hahahaha
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I really like and support this idea.
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Do you have any thoughts about whether or not now (through this proposal) is the right time to set up WAGDIE Games on Steam?
Does it convolute things too much?
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My only concern is stretching out all of our resources. I know this is meant to bring people together. But I wouldn’t want this to take away from members who are in the process of developing right now.
Hopefully this can bring people in and have a more centralized focus group.
My other concern is how will we get others to join in? From an outside perspective?
Considering the game jam is (by definition) only a week long, I’m not overly concerned with current in-development projects getting held up too much. The purpose of the theme being revealed at time of start is to prevent advanced development, and there’s a definite deadline for the submission process. Yes, there is potential for existing developers with active projects to become delayed by the week, but in the grand scheme, I don’t think that’s a huge deal.
As for attracting newcomer developers to the community, posting the jam on a platform like itch.io and broadcasting it on Twitter with the cash prizes will be a pretty solid draw.
We could run a more expansive campaign to get the jam visible in other game dev circles, like indiegamejams.com and subreddits like r/gamejams, but for the most part that’s the best you can do without a more extensive marketing effort.
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I agree with this and the purpose is to get OTHERS outside of our community involved in the game Jam. If this was just a proposal to incite those within our community to participate I would NOT support it.
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The central purpose of this proposal is to generate prototypes of games using the WAGDIE content that could become full products in the future.
Attracting others outside the community is simply a good method of doing so.
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King you’ve made sense about the funds provided so not that it matters but I retract my statement about needing more money as this is meant to prototype and can provide more funding if it needs to become bigger.
I think on the flip side this might be a good chance to pool resources as well. It’s probably OP and might already be happening. But imagine if Roll, Josiah, pandira, crypto chencho and others came together with 1 team.
If some superteam forms and steamrolls the “competition”, it’s still all for the best.
We’ll end up with some siiiick creation, and all the more potential for it going forward.
That said, talent helps but game jams are chaotic.
You never know who’s gonna nail it.
OP team doesn’t often win.
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Passed. Will keep this thread open until a date is decided for the event and further details on funding etc. locked in. @KingOffling
Yeah, thanks.
We’ve got a lot of lil details to sort out before anything can move here.
Need opinions from others:
WHEN DO YOU THINK WE SHOULD DO THIS?
WHO OPERATES GAME JAM CHANNELS IN DISCORD?
When do you think you’ll have time to run it, and then you could ask for help.
Will create a channel for it