3 Days. From Friday to Monday (depending on the time zone).

Regular: Yes! Anything goes, as long as the game's core experience is crafted during the allowed time. O.D.A: In general, no. This category focuses on creating a game from scratch. However, it's OK to use pre-existing assets from the following categories: fonts, code (engine, shaders, etc.) and logos. This means you cannot use any premade art, music, or SFX. Additionally, the game's core experience must be crafted during the allowed time.

The use of generative AI is restricted. As a community, we understand the negative impact generative AI has on creatives with specialist skill sets. We understand the that many generative AI tools were trained unethically. Our jam celebrates creatives and their work. D2J organizers feel that using generative AI to replace traditional roles in game development is not in the spirit of game jamming. The restriction focuses on tech that is widely considered "not in the spirit of game jamming". Most of this is based around generating content for your game that would otherwise be created by a hypothetical team mate. The restriction is less focused on AI tech that is not replacing creativity, such as auto-complete coding or searching for information on the web. To clarify, asking an AI Agent to write a chunk of code for you or asking it to fix your code is still forbidden. Enforcement of rules in a game jam, around AI or otherwise, is challenging. We will be adding the ability to report entries that have clearly breached any jam rules. Reports will be manually reviewed by the jam organizers.

You will need to upload your game to a site such as Itch.io to host the game files. Then you can make a game page on the d2jam site (by clicking the create game button) and create a link on that page to where you hosted the game files. A page on the d2jam site is required to let people browse games in the jam easily and to let you be rated. Eventually we may support game hosting directly on the d2jam site in a future jam but it would require the jam being supported by donations due to storage costs.

You cannot make edits to the jam build of the game during the rating period apart from game breaking bug fixes and porting. (For example if you want to make a mac build during the rating period without changing anything about the game thats fine. If you have a bug that prevents someone from playing your game due to a crash that would be a game breaking bug and can be fixed). You can make and post a post-jam version of the game during the rating period but the jam version of the game must be more prominent and you cannot trick people into playing the post-jam version of the game. You can use jampack to have 2 web builds on the same page.

There is a 2 hour window after the jam ends that you can still upload a game within in order to catch any people that might be having last minute issues with builds. This is meant to be a period to upload within rather than work on the game more within and attempts to submit after the 2 hour submission window will not be accepted.

Yes you can edit the game page and make marketing materials (e.g. a game trailer, advertising for your game) within the rating period. The sooner you make it the more people would end up seeing your game page changes though.

If you include things such as NSFW content you must mark your game as containing it so anybody who does not want to see that content can filter it out.

Any operating systems you want. Note however that the more you support the more people are able to play your game. In addition supporting windows or having a web build is recommended as that allows the vast majority of people to play your game.

You can use whatever you want to make the game as long as it does not require the people playing the game to download something other than the game itself. For example games on roblox would not be allowed as that requires people to download roblox instead of downloading the game itself.

Regular: Any number of people. O.D.A: Only one developer.

Yes. It is typically better to focus on one game though so you can give it a higher level of polish within the limited timeframe.

We have a team finder built into the site you can use to find a team on. In the site settings you can set what roles you have on a team and then in the team finder you can limit results to only show teams that need your role. In addition you can use other locations such as on social media or in the team finding channel on our discord server.

Yes you can edit teams at any time before the rating period ends. So if you forgot to add a teammate before the jam ended and they want to be able to contribute to the rankings you can invite them into the team during the rating period.

No but they cannot rate games or be credited directly in the site UI without an account.

Games are rated by other participants in the following categories: - OVERALL: Your overall opinion of the game, how well all the categories are sticking together. - GAMEPLAY: How much you enjoy playing the game, and how satisfying the mechanics are. - AUDIO: How good the game sounds, or how effective the sound design is. - GRAPHICS: How good the game looks, and how effective the visual style is. - CREATIVITY: Uniqueness, Originality, Innovation, and the surprise element. - EMOTIONAL DELIVERY: How effectively the emotional or humorous elements are delivered. - THEME: The game’s take on the theme, and how well it was used and executed.

Only the Overall and Theme ratings will be initially opted in and cannot be opted out. You must select and opt-in to any other rating category you wish to be rated and/or compete in.

Yes but any ratings they give do not contribute to the rankings.

After the rating period games will be ranked in each category based on their average rating in that category. For example the game with the highest average theme score will be rank #1 in the theme category.

For the current edition of the jam you need to both rate 5 games and receive 5 ratings. This prevents a game with only 1 5 star rating from instantly winning the jam.

The prize is having a game that you've managed to build and release. Theres nothing like a cash prize so the jam has more of a community feel instead of becoming competitive.

Yes you can stream anything relating to the jam you want. e.g. making progress on your game, playing games made by other people, etc.

There is 3 priority tiers in the featured streamers section. The higher priority you are the further ahead in the featured streamers you show. Streams with the same priority are ordered by viewers with some randomness. Only livestreams from twitch show due to youtube not providing an equivalent api. The lowest priority (that only ever has 3 streams show from) is any gamedev stream on twitch. The medium priority is anyone that has been marked as a streamer on the site (a.k.a streamers who have an account on the d2jam site). The highest priority is streams that use the d2jam tag (to show that they are streaming something related to the jam). Only streams within the following categories will be shown: Software and Game Development, Art, Co-working & Studying, and Games + Demos.

For now just let Ategon know your d2jam username and your twitch account.

The site has a built in event system that shows upcoming and active events. If you are marked as a streamer you can go to the events page and then add a new event for your stream to make it show there. The events are located in the sidebar.

The jam is organized primarily by a group of 11 people who make sure things run smoothly and who run things like the social media accounts for the jam for marketing. Decisions however are typically voted on by the community to let the community control how the jam is run and anybody is free to start running something related to the jam such as a tournament, community keynote, or other event. The 11 core organizers are Ategon, Badcop, FunBaseAlpha, Pomo, Rincs, Aeron, itsBoats, Brainoid, HonestDan, Kuviman, and Tobugis.

The server that hosts the jam is in Canada. In the future various things such as the email service, DNS, etc. will be swapped to have as many Canadian-based technologies as possible.

There is currently no way to donate to the jam but it will be made in the future once it gets popular enough that it makes sense to spend the funds to make a non-profit for the jam.

The site is currently open source with the repositories available in our github organization. Jamcore is the backend of the site while jamjar is the frontend. Each repository has instructions on how to set it up locally and a project board with tasks that need to be made for the site. If you have any questions relating to contributing feel free to chat in the site development channel in our discord.

You can currently reports bugs in our code repositories until a bug report feature is built into the site itself. You click on the relevant repository (e.g. if its a frontend issue you would go to Jamjar), go to the issues tab, and then create a new issue.

The jam happens twice a year, typically around 6 months apart.