Theme
Keeping it simple for the first game jam, the theme is the USSR. Home of the first successful communist revolution and workers' state, the Soviet Union seems a good place to begin. How you engage with this theme is up to you. Games based on Soviet literature and cinema, games featuring events and figures from Soviet history, games that might have been made in the Soviet Union if computer gaming had taken off there, the possibilities are many.
If you want to make a retro-style game, you may find these resources useful:
- 8 bit White Army Black Baron
- 8 bit Soviet anthem
- 8 bit Katyusha
- Hell, this channel in general has many 8 bit Soviet songs
- Pixel art hammer and sickle
Submission Requirements
- Submissions must be posted publicly in the submissions subthread below.
- Submissions must be turned in on time (by 5PM Eastern time on March 18)
- Submissions must follow the Jam's theme
- Submissions must not promote reactionary ideas (bigotry, imperialism, etc.)
- No pornographic works (sexual themes may be fine, but explicit sexual content is not)
- For safety purposes, submissions must include source code
Awards
Submissions will be eligible for the following awards, based on community vote:
- Best Overall: The best overall game for both theme and engagement.
- Most Thematic: The game that best exemplifies the jam's theme.
- Most Engaging: The game that offers the best gameplay experience, whether that be through mechanics, artwork, story, etc.
Voting will be done in a dedicated voting thread, to be created near the end of the submission deadline. To minimize the risk of sockpuppeting/ballot stuffing, each user will post their votes under their username and an account must have had at least 10 posts as of March 1 to vote. My initial plan was to have votes delivered to my privately to avoid any game emerging as a frontrunner early, but ultimately I decided that it wouldn't be worth the loss in transparency.
Commenting Policy
To keep things easy to follow, I've created separate subthreads for entry submissions and donation announcements. Please put submissions/donations in these subthreads or I might miss them.
Donation Drive
The community has decided to use this game jam to promote the good work of Doctors Without Borders in Ukraine and elsewhere.
You can donate to DWB here. To have your donation counted toward the total, post a screenshot of your donation into the subthread below (with personal information scrubbed, of course!).
To kick things off, here is my own contribution.
So far, Hexjam has raised $360.92 for Doctors Without Borders.
I have no money to give and no ability to code, but I give this for free, "Doct-bears Without Borders" as a title to a game. Be free brain butterfly, fly, fly away.
I don't normally do this kinda thing but y'all make me wanna: https://i.imgur.com/CoKrYfq.png
$100 https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/YKi5L0yUlJ.jpg
i'd love to see a chip tunes version of this. (i was specifically addressing the link under the word work, not realizing they were all different tunes, but chip tunes for all.)
I work with ISW's super audio cart (which is really accurate for fakebit) a lot so i could prob do that lol, just need to find the time.
:party-cat:
edit: thanks, meant to respond to your answer above
I like the first one can i use it for title screen and credits?
feel free as long as you credit. the composition title is Drifting Leaves and it's under the username i'm using now
Literally still finishing things up 5 minutes ago. Deadline in 6 minutes, don't have time to play test. Might not work at all. Let me know if there's an error and game is unplayable.
https://alyxms.itch.io/luna-program
This plays pretty slick, actually one of the coolest looks on Twee I've seen. Got the hang of it after blowing my whole budget in a couple weeks, Mishin's alcoholic madness is pretty great, and the story is compelling thus far~ I will be back this evenin' to land my army of cosmonauts and find what the heck's goin' on up there.
Story event is gonna get less and less frequent as you progress. Ran out of time while making mid to late game content.
Thanks for the praise! :meow-bounce:
I haven't actually got the time to play through it even once, so let me know if you got stuck and can't reach the end.(Testing now. I have confirmed the "Cosmonaut drawing enemy attention away from injured comrade" action do not work and would give an error. "Cosmonaut patching up comrade in critical condition" works but would throw an error. Fixed both and uploaded as a separate bug fix file.)
(Took a coupe hours to play through it, can confirm the game is indeed completable. Found a few minor bugs, but one of them actually benefit the player so won't bother fixing it.)
Dang, this game goes further than I thought, sweet beans, and how the hell did you have time to make this much content?! Only bugs of note I got was when ye 'Stop tracking' the last site on the list, and my cosmos kept shootin' 'til their remaining bullets went negative.
Really cool, if only I knew salty pizzas were the ultimate answer. 196 weeks. Woulda been like 170 but my 6-man team got wiped :< Boppin' fun.
Deadline's been extended, you still have half an hour for last-minute touches!
EDIT: Game runs, at the very least. Looks cool so far!
Thanks for the extension. Found a few major bugs. Updated. I think it should be completable now. I hope.
I made something in RPG maker.
Features: multiple endings! walls of text because leftism! original artwork! music by our very own @WhyEssEff! in and out 10 min tops experience!
JRPGs are not my cup of tea but I wanted to see how flexible the engine is for those of us who don't know what a code is. Verdict: it's pretty flexible thanks to resources other users have created, the main drawback is the very limited resolution.
I get an "rpgvxace rtp is required to run this game" error when I try to run it
One solution is for the user to download and install RPGVX RTP. Better solution is to include the RTP while packing the game. Haven't used RPG VX for years but I'm fairly sure there's an option for that while packaging.
Once packed, rpg vx will generate a self extracting zip in the form of an exe file. The content can be extracted with something like 7-zip without running the file. If the user doesn't trust the game.exe within, a game.exe from any rpgvx game should work.
OK, uploaded a new version: https://tychoxi.itch.io/hexjam It should work now.
"rtp" are the default assets, turns out you have to tell the engine to export them as well. I was able to play the version i uploaded to itch because I have the default assets installed with the engine so i didnt notice the issue.
WELL FUCK, this is lame. I was 100% sure I had one more day, I thought we had 7 days exactly from the post date, but that post date turned out to be the edit date, so I assumed I had like 18 hours yet. I literally just browsed this thread in bed and jumped out to get it here today at least.
Whatever. Better late than never, I don't need to abide by no stinkin' deadline. I enjoyed making it and I learned a lot of fun facts about the space program. I wanted to clean up and balance some, I probably still will. But this totally still functions and I think makes for a half-decent game with fun facts. I dedicate it to my hatred of timezones.
https://sargeant-lion.itch.io/soviets-in-space
Oof, that's rough. Sorry to hear that. You'll be ineligible for awards, but I'll go ahead and include you in the thread so that your game isn't overlooked completely. Part of the purpose of this jam was to produce proletarian art, after all, and it'd be a shame if your contribution got buried because it missed a deadline by a few hours.
Thanks, appreciate it <3 'sall good, I still had fun and learned, as I say.
Lost a few times to the americans on Lunokhod 1. :ussr-cry:
Once I figured out building things directly is faster than special parts, it worked out.
Other than I couldn't figure out how to use research points on parts, game's super intuitive.
Kinda cool how we both chose the space program as our theme.
Poor robawts, game definitely jumps in difficulty at the one point. And yeah, pretty sure research->parts is bugged, alas.
Appreciate the play and the nice feedback <3 on yours right now. Hell yeah to our psychic link, space likers unite :sputnik:
I'm not sure what the fuck is happening in this but it made me chuckle
I'm available for 2D or simple 3D art or I might try to learn how to make something simple like a CYOA.
If you're looking for simple CYOA software to make stuff in:
Twine is popular for interactive fiction stuff
Ren'py is popular for making visual novel style stuff (by default it totally looks like a dating sim but you can customize the shit out of it, or just make a dating sim with Stalin/Lenin/Tr*tsky routes)
Working on a top down unity game probs; got a game idea that's been burnin in the back of my head lately, and want to try to program some of the mechanics and engine stuff I can use for later main project
So the theme is not volcel police after all. Also the no porn game rule is gone.
:volcel-police: in shambles.
Wish I have spent more time learning about soviet history, I'm only somewhat familiar with soviet space program. Gonna have to make something entirely fictional now. Plan is to make a text based game in Twine about the Soviet Union battling aliens and the US on the moon. Think it might work.
there is maybe a 20% chance I participate but I got some questions anyways
what's the plan for uploading/hosting submissions? it's probably not good for opsec for people to use personal cloud storage accounts.
should we be required to also include the source code, for security reasons?
are there specific platforms we should target?
what’s the plan for uploading/hosting submissions? it’s probably not good for opsec for people to use personal cloud storage accounts.
If you're worried about opsec, you can always put them on burner itch.io accounts.
should we be required to also include the source code, for security reasons?
Good point, will add this requirement to the post
are there specific platforms we should target?
None required, but the more people who can play your game the more who might vote on it for an award, so that should be incentive enough
I'm starting my game right after work tonight. I'm gonna shot for a super basic platformer in Godot Engine.
This is awesome. And fairly well timed for me - I'm hankering to code somethin' lately.
I'm an okay programmer with decent experience coding 3D/2D game-type-things in Godot, but practically zero artistic ability or creativity. Open to simple game design suggestions / collab, otherwise I'll dream up something boring, let's see what silly results can be made.
And sure, I'm already convinced to donate, though I'm usually harder to crack. MSF are cool and so is this.
Except they keep declining my card, dangit. I'll get there.Gawt itLast day. Game's only like 70% complete. Scrapping features now. :sicko-no:
Hope other comrades are doing better.
Always had problems with scope creep. I've started and abandoned no less than 10 game projects. And this would be the first one I ever finished.
