Amazing!! I’m definitely in for this. (My first competition!)
Just a few questions: When the theme is forest is it that you can make any game mode as long as the map is like a forest (Ex: a maze in the forest or some kind of tag game in the forest) right?
what do you mean by this?
The problem is what you described, the fact that the theme is too broad. Leads to more people using old maps and pretending they were a part of the two week timeframe. More strict themes make it so they have to make something new.
The maps will be submitted anonymously via Google form once they finish it.
but what if other people read the form?
(that are not meepeygamer567)
oh ok
I haven’t used forms in while.
You just submit something in the form. You can’t see others submissions. It’s that simple
And either way if they do voting they won’t tell you who made the maps
that’s not really something you can prevent that much…
and you would have to be incredibly specific with the theme
but even so with such a broad amount of people there’s still gonna be peeps using old maps that just happen to be within that strict theme and it would just end up limiting what you can actually make increasing the chances of an incredibly repetitive list of games
does anyone wanna collab with me?
I don’t have access to the wix tho.
does this count as off topic?
pls tell me if it is
In real game jams, it does work. We probably don’t have enough people for this.
For example, a stereotypical prompt would be “death is only the beginning,” which allows you to have a lot of games but most games will not be anything like it.
Just watch a real game jam.
except this isn’t really that kind of gamejam that has those sorts of tools because most game jams I see are hosted by the developers themselves so they can actually check the date of when the game was made or etc
from what I see y’all are just hosting it community wise with hardly to no developer contribution which brings us to the same problem of which really limits what we can do about it
When you submit your game to a game jam, there’s no way to tell when it was made. If there’s any metadata, you can just edit it out.
There’s usually “one” host group, and there are developers outside of that group that will submit something,
that’s exactly my point you cant tell when the game is made and it would be pointless to try to prevent it
meaning that having a stricter theme would just be more limiting then it needs to be
I don’t think discussing the theme would be off topic for a gimjam post
aside from that it was a really calm discussion
anyways I’ma move on from this now :P
game relating to forest. could be in a forest… maybe something else if you can think of it.
Just read the post again, it’s not that difficult, you’re supposed to submit your map link via a google form.
People don’t need to know that, just do your best on the game and try get it done before the deadline.
We truly appreciate your feedback. We’ve actually had some internal discourse about how the plan doesn’t feel game-jam-y (hence the simplistic theme and the theme somehow not being mandatory) but a few people have left the loosely connected panel of planners who were against these ideas so we will be considering implementing a lot of these suggestions.
I believe the reason we’ve had a simple theme and the theme not being mandatory was that a more complex theme could limit participants’ options which wouldn’t be fun and that it would decrease submissions to the contest. If you guys beg to differ, please do! We are willing to hear y’all’s opinions!
As for this being the Fall Gim Jam…
Guess we’ll have to find out what happens in the future… 
As for this, the plan is that on October 1st, we will be opening submissions via Google form and we will put in submissions in a section of the first post of this thread (this is kinda the mean reason why we made this thread in the first place lol). Once the first links roll in, y’all can go check them out.
Basically don’t make it surface level obvious that you made this map. You can make help posts and such.
The intent of this rule is to ensure votes are about the quality of the map and not the popularity of the creator so we will step in if we find that the latter is happening and not the former.
How would the people who run the jam know whose map is whose if we cannot say who made it?
I’m assuming you’d say something in the game description.
EXAMPLE:
“Entry for Gim Jam Fall 2025”
without refrencing your name, of course.
We’ll have a section on the Google form where you can share how we can contact you or something similar to that.