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.

  • sgtlion [any]
    ·
    edit-2
    3 years ago

    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

    • BeamBrain [he/him]
      hexagon
      ·
      3 years ago

      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.

      • sgtlion [any]
        ·
        3 years ago

        Thanks, appreciate it <3 'sall good, I still had fun and learned, as I say.

    • AlyxMS [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      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.

      • sgtlion [any]
        ·
        edit-2
        3 years ago

        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: