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:

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.

  • Tychoxii [he/him, they/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    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.

    • BeamBrain [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      I get an "rpgvxace rtp is required to run this game" error when I try to run it

      • Tychoxii [he/him, they/them]
        ·
        3 years ago

        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.

      • AlyxMS [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        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.