Jamoween... you are outta here
The first Jamoween from Indie Game Squad has come to an end. After 8 days of art, sounds and programming the entries were submitted and the judgments were passed
From the 17 signups there were 7 final submissions, all available on itch.io for public play, for those of you who haven’t been paying attention let’s do a quick recap…
It begins...
Jamoween from Indie Game Squad kicked off on Friday the 16th of October with a theme was given to us by Twitch streamer/Game aficionado Mr Pedro Panace on Dunnykin‘s stream the day the Jam began, see the clip over there…
Like Game Jam 192 the jam was hosted on the itch.io website, but unlike Game Jam 192 we opened registrations up from the start, promoted it ourselves through the Indie Game Squad social media channels and via the website.
Once again, Brian Baglow of Scottish Games Network gave the jam a plug on the site as well as liking and sharing posts across his channels. And the usual suspects retweeted and shared the various posts (thank you to each and every one of you, it was really appreciated!).
What was the theme?
The Jam kicked off on Friday the 16th of October 2020 at 2pm, the theme was announced and eight days and nights of art, music, sound effects, programming and brain storming began. That theme was… it was in the video above.. did you not watch it? It was less than 2 minutes! Fine, the theme was “Death is not the end, it’s only the beginning”.
``Death is not the end, it is only the beginning``
Let the games (making) begin...
Jamoween saw 17 sign ups for the competition, most of whom jumped onto the discord server and were interacting throughout the competition. We had regular development progress updates and screenshots from many of the teams, lots of discussion around ideas, problem solving amongst different teams, and the usual discussion of game engines, art styles, ‘why is this broken’ and just the usual talk you’d expect when you put a murder of game enthusiasts in a problem solving situation that needs a twist and some fun thrown in.
You want to know what we made don’t ya? Well there were 7 entries for Jamoween and they were…
(Jamoween) EndSong Game Concept
LakeDead created a game concept with a rock-paper-scissors style of combat system and some great looking art work. The game play was minimal, but the developer is looking to carry on developing the game further.
God's Away Today
God’s Away Today from Strange High House see you taking over god’s role and deciding who gets into heaven, who goes to hell and who will live in limbo. The game levels up and keeps things interesting by introducing different rules from different religions after each wave of dealing with the dead.
Once Bitten
Once bitten is a semi-top down biter. You control a Vampire, Werewolf or Zombie and try to capture some souls for the Grim Reaper.
The Fight for Valhalla
Allus Interactive gave us a lovely RPG where you play as the norse warrior Ingirun, as she fights alongside her brothers for the glory of Valhalla.
Bloodlines
Finlay, a team of one guy who had a game, came up with a mini metro inspired strategy game where you connect critical organs using veins.
Total Shambles - Escape The Mob
Run, Grizzly! brought us a zombie runner where you need to escape the mob while avoiding traps and eating brains, trying to achieve full, feral state to make your escape.
Urning a Living
In this game from Frozen Well, death is not the end it is just the beginning of someone’s job, this being Kevin the Crematorium Worker. Help Kevin process the incoming coffins and deliver the ashes of their loved ones to the mourners
You have 2 minutes to see how much money you can make.
We're almost there, just another handful of paragraphs to go...
We wrapped up Jamoween on Sunday via Twitch, when Pedro Panache played and reviewed each and every game live on stream (You can go and watch the video at HERE). It was great to see someone trying all of the games fresh, having seen very little to none of the development over the 8 days and taking them as they were presented. after playing through all of the games Pedro then proceeded to cast his vote on Itch and awarded the ‘Spirit of the Jam’ honourable mention to… oh, you don’t know what the spirit of the jam is? Well, the way we run these things is we have a public vote where the competitors and general public can play, vote and comment on each and every game once all of the submission have been submitted. The Spirit of the Jam is chosen by the theme creator based on the game the felt was most in the spirit of the jam, and that award went to…
Frozen Well with Urning a Living
One streams ending is another's beginning... oh and the winner is
As one stream ends another begins, as Pedro signed off he passed us over to Dunnykin just in time for the public voting finishing. After little round up of the weeks events and all the thank you’s Dunnykin announce the winner of the first ever Jamoween and it went to…
Frozen Well with Urning a Living
That’s right, Frozen well hit the double whammy and cleaned up just in time for Halloween. Congratulations to Frozen Well for his second Indie Game Squad game jam win.
Check out all the results and different criteria the games were rated on at ITCH.IO
The lost games...
As you now know we had 17 people sign up for Jamoween, of those 17 we had seven final submissions, but we know from the conversation and interaction on Discord throughout the jam that there were several other teams working on their entries.
We were seeing progress reports and screen shots of how their games were coming along, and they looked good, but alas some of the teams just ran out of time. Some had other commitments that took priority and others hit some technical difficulties at the last hurdle.
Signing up to take part in a game jam can be a big enough hurdle as it is, especially in the current climate, and getting to the finish line is a massive task, so for those who never managed to submit your games this time, please don’t beat yourself up, you did a great job staying focused and sharing your game dev journey with us, and hopefully you took something positive away from the jam that you can apply to your next one. I really hope that you push on with the project you started and get it uploaded to Itch, or somewhere online, and when you do drop us a message so that we can check it out!
Cheers for getting to the end of this article, I tried to keep it short...
Thanks to Pedro Panache for choosing a great theme and taking several hours to go through all of the games on stream for us.
To Brain Baglow from Scottish Games Network for promoting the event and to everyone else who tweeted, retweeted, shared and spoke about the jam.
Cheers to Jamie Morrison who helped get everything set up and for pre-jam stream kick off and post-jam stream round up.
And to the Indie Game Squad members for suggestions and input.
But the biggest thanks, as last time, goes to everyone who took part in the game jam, without you we would have had a pretty short Twitch stream! You all put in a massive effort and should be proud of the games you produced… let’s see if you can pull it off again at the next one!
Cheers
Andrew
