I Hosted a Game Jam for S&box

I Hosted a Game Jam

The last few months have been very fun for Ape Tavern. We’ve been working on a variety of fun s&box games, getting acclimated to the play fund, and maintaining our existing games.

In May, I approached ubre (of Small Fish fame) about hosting a game jam. We both had toyed with the idea of hosting a game jam for the s&box community. I had never hosted a game jam before, so I figured it would be wise to have an additional host that could help with planning, ideas, etc.

Sadly he backed out the next day.

So I emailed Garry directly instead. He was receptive to the idea immediately, and recommended I try hosting it on itch.io, so I started planning and working on the jam page.

As a preface, I’m writing this as a log of my thoughts and feelings about the jam, so that next time a jam is hosted, the process can be refined and improved. It may get a bit rambly at times!

Itch.io Troubles

One big reason behind using Itch.io is its outreach - there are plenty of developers on Itch.io who may have never heard of s&box, and love to do game jams. We wanted to get the jam featured on the front page so that we could have as high impact as possible.

Sadly, Itch.io does not respond to customer support requests in a timely manner. In fact, my offer to pay for the jam to be featured (and request for custom CSS support) was never responded to, even after 50 days of waiting. I asked for help in the Discord, but it was just full of people who have been waiting months for their Itch.io payouts.

Another problem was spammers - people would sign up for game jams and submit their $4.99 low quality game hoping to get more eyes on it. I would report these and disqualify them, but seeing no action taken against these accounts is disappointing. Itch.io seems to have so much potential, but there is little investment in supporting the community around it.

Judging

I had handpicked a group of judges from the community and Facepunch. I tried to pick people who were passionate about making and playing games, or had a positive history of community interaction. In the end, we had 8 judges: bakscratch, Carson, devultj, Jason, Papa Brickolini, Eridium, ubre, and myself. I was impressed with the amount of time each judge invested into judging.

I had picked 4 categories for judging: Fun, Polish, Innovation, and Theme Adherence. A lot of people were upset I didn’t have Art, or some other category. My response to this is that judges should be judged cohesively! If a game has really nice art, but the art style is inconsistent or doesn’t lend itself to the gameplay, it makes the category difficult to judge in; polish handles this much more nicely. The larger, overarching categories are a much better way to judge a game.

One improvement I would make next time is provide a better rubric for judging each category. One judge’s 5/5 for Innovation might have been another judge’s 3/5. Realistically, as long as a judge was consistent with their own ratings, it’s not a big dea - the ratings are averaged automatically by Itch.io. But defining what warrants each score might be helpful for judges going forward.

The Games

The best part of the jam is the games that come out of it. I was blown away by what people created in 2 weeks.

The judges had a variety of takes on their favourite games. In fact, my favourite game did not even place in the top 5! This jam showed that s&box is capable of wide and diverse variety of games, and is not just a “FPS Mod Fetish” like this bluesky noob seems to believe.

To all who participated, thank you! I’d like to host more jams in the future if Facepunch ends up wanting to sponsor more.

Wrapping Up

This jam was very fun to host, and I’m so thankful to everyone who helped facilitate, judged, or participated. Even though I did not personally benefit from the jam, it feels great to contribute to something that makes the s&box community better. Also, I’m still riding the high of Garry saying good job to me.