TL;DR:
The Arbitrary Gamejam 10 (#TAGJam10) is the tenth game jam in a monthly series of game jams, with the goal of promoting indie devs. Each month's jam is organized and hosted by the winner of the previous month:
- TAGJam10 runs from May 2 to May 12, 2014
- In celebration of 10 months of TAG, #TAGJam10 will run for 10 days rather than the usual 48/72 hours.
- Optional Bonus rule 1: Participants must post about their progress/lessons-learned after each day, and give constructive feedback/encouragement to other participants
- Optional Bonus rule 2 : Record & post a video of a mother playing the game or giving feedback on it (Mother's Day - May 11)
- More info: The Arbitrary Gamejam 10 website
The Arbitrary Gamejam (TAG) - a monthly game jam
TAG is a series of monthly game jams with the goal of promoting small and unknown indie game developers. The winner of one month's gamejam is tagged and will be responsible for hosting the next month's gamejam, pulling traffic to their websites. (That's the prize/punishment for winning.) Every month, it is hosted by a different indie game dev.
[More info on the overall TAG series and the previous 9 TAGs]
The Arbitrary Gamejam 10 (#TAGJam10)
To celebrate the 10th month of TAG, #TAGJam10 will run for TEN days (May 2 to May 12) instead of the usual 48/72 hour sleep-deprived frenzy. Participants do not have to use the full ten days if they don't need to or want to.
The experiment this month is to spread the duration out and allow the participant to get into a habit of working a little on their game each day - and see what happens. Will the games be more complete and polished? Or will procrastination and over-perfectionism rule the day and result in broken games?
One of the special bonus rules of the jam is for the participant to post about their progress and lessons-learned after each day that they worked on the game, and give respectful constructive feedback/encouragement to other participants' progress threads. Whether one participates in the game jam or not, be sure to check the progress/lessons-learned threads (link will be posted before the jam starts); it is sure be of value to any indie game dev.
In honor of Mother's Day, May 11, the other bonus rule is to record and post a video of a mother (any mother) playing the game or giving input/feedback on the game at any point in the jam. Explores the questions: Will the design of a game be influenced simply by knowing that a mother will play the game? And what do mothers think about games?
There will be no formal signup or registration. Simply participate and submit your game. One can participate solo or as a team.
Participants can tweet using #TAGJam10 to let others know that that are planning to participate.
Schedule
- May 2 (Fri), 7:00 PM EDT: Themes will be announced. You may begin immediately. Official start of gamejam.
- May 7 (Wed), 7:00 PM EDT: Midway point. 5 days remaining. Submissions open.
- May 12 (Mon), 7:00 PM EDT: Official end of game jamming. No more game dev for the jam should happen after this. Please try to have your game submitted by this time.
- May 13 (Tue), 7:00 AM EDT: Final deadline for submissions (grace period).
- May 14 (Wed), 7:00 AM EDT: Winner (host of June's gamejam) announced. Judging results and game feedback released. (This may be delayed if there are more submissions than usual).
Themes
The game jam will have three themes. Participants must address one of the themes in their game. Games which address more themes will be rated higher.
Two of the three themes will be generated using a random word generator. TAG is intentionally arbitrary to encourage outside-the-box thinking and wild combinations. The host picks the third theme and comes up with special rules.
Hosts
TAGJam10 is hosted and organized by Andrew Wang and Wanni Wang, the winners of The Arbitrary Gamejam 9, which happened on April 5-6, 48-hour game jam with the themes of "runner", "expedited", and "decay", with a special rule: "teach something".
Their winning game was The The Last Polar Bear. See other submitted games and judging results from the previous game jam.
For more info on The Arbitrary Gamejam 10 (May 2-12, 2014), please visit the website.
