Wow!   Well I just want to say thanks for everyone for all the kind words and ratings for The Adventures of Yulpers!

I have been toiling away at the same project for close to four years now, so it felt great to start and finish something in just a month.   And to have folks react so positively to it was just amazing.  I had my doubts when I let the kids vote on what game I should make for the jam but looks like they made the right call after all. :)

I also want to say thanks one last time to chasersgaming for organizing and officiating the Jam this year.  

And congrats to everyone for another great jam this year!   I had a great time checking out all the entries and am already looking forward next year's jam.  :)

Congrats withthelove! Yulpers is a very fun game and you deserve the win.

I am sorry it took me so long to respond to this. Congratulations everyone!

I have to admit that I am so exhausted after this and will probably be taking a break from game making for a while.

Thanks, if I didn't have the OGA favourite title, I would've been kinda disappointed by my placement, but it's ok.

The main issue I had was the one with the credits links, if you remember, otherwise not really.

@chasersgaming:

I couldn't disagree more with that idea.  Other than CC0, it's in the text of all these licenses that you must provide credit including a link to the original work.  I don't think we should be doing anything that signals that it's ok to not do this or be loose about how it's done.

I think Spring's hang up was making the link something you can click on.  I do support dropping the text about that.  It's strictly an optional 'nice to have' feature and seems to have caused some confusion.

I think there's got to be a better way to handle the 'theme' and 'challenge' bits.  I love the idea of linking the game and art challenges, but I think we either need to make the connection stronger (eg. require assets from the challenges be used) or toss it altogether.   As it was, I found it very hard to rate these two categories this year.

Tbh, who cares about the art challenges?

I certainly do much less than I do for the game jams. :P

yeah I am a big fan of the art jams.  They are actually a better fit OGA than the game jams. 

I just had a little trouble connecting the two this year.

One solution that occurs to me, is to put the onus for getting 'theme' and 'challenge' stars on the submitter.   So if you want the points, then you've got to explicitly state which assets you used from which challenges.   Ditto for themes.   Makes it a little harder on the submitter, but saves everyone else the trouble of investigating this stuff themselves.

I guess for theme the idea would be state which theme (or themes) you were going for and then voters can rate you according to how well they think you hit it.

@chasersgaming I don't really see the need in always having to tie the art challenges together with the game jams though.

also, you misspelled Kymiball as "Kimiball" :'D

If you think OGA assets are the main focus then ok. I think the main focus is to make the best game.

But enough rambling from me about that, I just don't think you should try and force a rigid system into being in order for those assets to get used.

Yeah the ultimate aim of the game jam is to promote OGA and OGA art.

Obviously, though for the contestants the goal is to make the best game possible.

Adding Challenge/Theme to the voting criteria does seem to work at cross purpose with that.  Should you try to make the best game or use the most art from the challenges?  I think the general idea is to shoot for the former, but the voting criteria actually tilts a bit toward the later (two categories for 'theme' and 'challenge' vs one for 'playability').

Two ideas for solutions:

1) Split the two up.  Add a separate award for the 'theme' and 'challenge' stuff and make it completely indepedent from the overal 'best game' award. 

This could replace the OGA favorite award, if we're worried about there being too many awards.

2) Make use of the challenge art mandatory.

So something like: submissions must use at least 6 OGA assets including at least 2 from one of the previous year's art challenges.  For theme, game must fit theme of at least one of the previous year's art challenges.

Of these two, I almost prefer the 2nd.  It's more rigid than the current totally open contest, but on the other hand, it's still pretty flexibile.  The themes themselves are fairly broad and IIRC some folks were requesting a theme because it gave them some where to start instead of a totally blank canvas.

> I was thinking that aswell, 6 assets, 2 (mandatory)being from the art challenges from previous years

that sounds about right to me.   Plus some kind of text saying you've got to mention which assets from which challenges.

> and having a theme, voted for by the community, themes from the art challenges from previous years.

So theme is voted on from list of previous year's art challenge themes?

Maybe better from a short list of themes from previous challenges?

I actually don't mind saying 'choose a theme', leaves it more open, just require people to say which theme it was they were going for.

I like the wording:

'use of artwork'

'use of music'

I almost wonder if those should replace the existing 'artwork', 'music', etc. categories.

to me that art challenge thing seems so unneccessary, like why? It's nice if someone wants to, but why should we be forced to use these things?

The point of the jam is to bring attention to OGA and show off what can be done with assets from OGA.

Tying the Game Jam to the Art Challenges can help drive interest in both.

And here I thought the point of the jam was to make games :/

Well, yeah the ultimate goal of the jam is for everyone to have fun making and playing games.

But the goal of specifically hosting an OpenGameArt Game Jam is to promote OGA and show off some of the wonderful art available on OGA.

Interesting. Personally I think the games involved can stand on their own well enough for this to be more than just a promotional vehicle. 

( lost my post after hitting reply from the preview, hopefully won't get a duplicate )

If I may...

First of all, I just finally decided to join. Didn't before because I'm mainly a developer so I can't really bring anything interesting to an art-oriented community so take what I'm going to say with a grain of salt.

Anyway, I've been a silent follower of OGA for maybe 2-3 years. I too agree to the fact that it'd be nice to get this place a bit more out, and in my opinion I think that having both art/games challenges can be good. First to bring some more art in OGA, because it lost a bit of steam for the past year, and to bring some more games, because the point of the art is at the very end to be used in games... right?

Where I disagree a bit is on the 6 asset limitations, for 3 reasons to be precise.

1. *I* believe that it'd just be better to completely restrict the usage of assets to be from here, whether they add them before or during the jam. To give an example, a bit like the current Kenney asset jam going on : you can only use assets from his place.
While I do think that it's a bit self-promoting, I also think it isn't a bad strategy if you want more people to know about this place without coming out too douchey.

2. Another reason why I think it'd be good is limitation. Having some kind of limitation can help with creativity but it also helps idiots like me to stay on track when making a game. It can also serve as some kind of asset highlights?

3. Now, more of a personal reason but...
To be honest, while I totally agree that OGA has some wonderful assets, they are kind of... incomplete, even to make just a small little game. Don't get me wrong, yulpers is a good example that you can make something fun with little, but from a developer's perspective (who absolutely sucks at even modifying 8x8 arts) I always felt like that most of the assets are always missing "that little thing" to make them rise, though I can't really point out what is that thing.
For example I absolutely love Sara and think she deserves her little game, but I just can't gather enough -consistent- assets to make her a proper little game. Some are incomplete, some are inconsistent (pixel errors, color errors, grid error etc) and others are just too specific to the artist's mind at the time. But anyway, that last point is purely subjective so feel free to discard it and please don't get offended by it, there is already a huge amount of stuff and all for free so I don't want to sound entitled or something.

(arf, waiting for my other pc to get my avatar back)

"propel you to stardom" lol

Anyways, getting serious again now, I can feel that most of you guys are very passionate about this "promoting OGA" thing. But I feel having such a specific purpose like that could alienate a some people from participating, at least it does that to me. And if significantly fewer people end up joining the next jam due to the theme being more restrictive, you may not get closer to achieving what you wish for anyway. That is of course, just pure speculation on my side :P

I also feel the way the themes are chosen for the art challenges themselves isn't ideal, and if you want the jam to play into those, I think we should look into that as well.

@chasersgaming

No, it alienates me because it prevent me from developing creative ideas freely, specifically the art challenge thing, or having a set theme - I am never in any other game jams either for this reason.

Personally I just like and prefer doing a thing without thinking so much about a deep meaning or overarching purpose, it feels to me like the more you want to dig for a purpose in doing something, the less you're going to find.

@chasersgaming

Hmm... maybe. Though I suspect that artists don't get back to their work mainly because they don't particulary want to. I mean, I know for a fact that creating assets for a game is more work, and less fun, that creating assets on a whim.
If anything I'd suggest artists to try to give more details on what they had in mind when they create something. I had the chance to talk with a few and I noticed that most of the time while they create gorgeous stuff they don't have a clear plan of what kind of game they want for it.

Right now I'm currently trying to think of something from the "simple broad purpose" collection as a late submission because at least I won't have to frankenstein too much stuff. Again, as a developer, I think it's kind of a waste to not have games using the awesome stuff you can find, though we kind of know why it's not happening.

@Spring

Yeah but, like he said that's kind of the point of the OGA jam. I mean, there are already plenty of jams so if they make one where people can just use everything it wouldn't be that different from using the weekly jams or Ludum dares.

@Kuranyem I guess you are right, if you feel the competition needs to have a specific focus to stand out. I was just in it to have some fun, but maybe this is just not for me (I'll quit being so egocentric about it) 

@Kuranyem:

Welcome!  Awesome that this conversation got you to sign up, thanks for joing in!

> ( lost my post after hitting reply from the preview, hopefully won't get a duplicate )

holey moley have I had that happen to me alot on OGA over the years!   I recently switched (back) to firefox browser which seems to do a better job recovering your submission text if you hit back quickly enough on an error but even it's not proved full proof.  Lately, I've been trying to train my fingers to hit ctrl-A, ctrl-C before hitting 'save'...

>  *I* believe that it'd just be better to completely restrict the usage of assets to be from here, whether they add them before or during the jam.

I hadn't given it much thought before but I kind of like that idea.  It certainly is the most obvious way to make the jam promote OGA art.  There's the issue you get into about finding complete and/or compatible sets, but I do fundamentally like the idea that all the art from all the jam entries would come from OGA.  This is certianly the most straight forward way to align the games with the goals of the Jam (eg. showcase OGA art).

> For example I absolutely love Sara and think she deserves her little game, but I just can't gather enough -consistent- assets to make her a proper little game.

I 100% agree with this point.  Well not about Sara specifically as I haven't look into her case.  But yes, 100% this is actually the biggest challenge to using OGA assets that I see as a dev.  It is just very difficult to find /all/ the pieces you need to make a complete game.  That's sort of what the recent 'Missing Link' challenge was all about.  TBH, I don't know that it's a problem OGA needs to solve.  To some degree, I think it's just the nature of the beast.  The only real solution is probably more collaborative works where someone posts something and somebody else posts back filling in some 'missing links' they noticed.   And to the community's credit, you do see this kind of thing happen a fair bit on OGA.

Still, I 100% agree it's an issue and it does pose a problem for trying to run a game jam with the requirement that 100% of the art be from OGA.   I guess this is where the 'or added during the jam' idea comes in.  The requirement could be that you must submit any changes/extensions/etc. that you made to OGA works back to OGA at the end of the Jam.  This could promote a sort of 'virtuous cycle' in which art was published to OGA and then 'missing links' were filled in by folks actually trying to use the art in complete games.

> Though I suspect that artists don't get back to their work mainly because they don't particulary want to. I mean, I know for a fact that creating assets for a game is more work, and less fun, that creating assets on a whim

There's probably some of that, and to a certain extent the entire site exists on the whim of artists so it really only seems fair.

But I think there's also a lot of artists, especially folks just starting out, who simply don't know everything that's actually required to make a full game.  There's just so many little bits and pieces you never notice when you're playing games.  It's not something that's really obvious until you've been through the whole creation process a few times. 

On top of that, there's a certain amount of stuff that you just never know you need until you need it.  So much what a game needs is gameplay driven, unless you're all 'requirements document'-ed out from the get go, you're bound to run into some new sprite or animation or tile or something that you need that you never thought of at the outset.  Asking artists to anticipate this kind of stuff is both futile and unfair.

Again, I see this as a 'challenge devs face when trying to use OGA assets' not 'a major problem OGA needs to solve.'  However, it does point to the need to allow /some/ new art to be created for Jam entries.

@chasersgaming:

> Authors will never know to recreate/rework/add assets unless they get any feedback, they could get that feedback from the persons using those assets

that kind of feedback is /A LOT/ harder to give than it sounds. 

Think about it.  Someone puts who knows how much time into making a gorgeous set of sprites and tiles and then generously releases it onto OGA under an open license.  Now you go back and say 'this sets great, but I really need a 'hurt' animation for this and this sprite'?

You can try to dress it up as nice as you want, but no matter how you word it, you've flipped the script, instead of doing something incredibly nice for you, now this artists is taking orders from you.  Sometimes it ends well, but I've seen this kind of 'feedback' loop go awry many a time both on OGA and in the open source community more broadly.  In the worst cases, people get burnt out and stop contributing altogether because they are sick of being made to feel like they're taking orders from the insatiable mob.

@all:  Thinking out loud for a minute, I think the Art challenges are actually a pretty cool way to address the 'complete' works issue.  We've actually had a few challenge themes in recent memory that were kind of in this vein and I think the results were positive.  But to make it more general across all the challenges, maybe a standard '+5 favorites' if your submission is a derivative, expansion or compliment of an existing OGA asset.

@withthelove

It is why I suggested that artists should give more details, or to use another word more "context", on what they post sometimes. As a dev I can try to guess all I want but I can't read mind, so while I think that some things might be missing I still can be wrong.

Actually we can also address the big elephant in the room : at the end of the day it's still free work.

While I, as a dev, do see this place as a good source of materials to try to make a game, I've asked myself if it was the same for others? Again, we can make assumptions but they are just that, assumptions.
- Maybe some believe it's a good place to dump stuff they don't plan to work on anymore but would like to see in a game?
- Maybe they hope someone would help them to finish a complete set?
- Maybe it's simply to advertise their place?
- Maybe it's simply for fun?
We can never know, but depending on what they stand the resulting art is not going to be the same.

Like you already said someone can come, be amazed, ask for a hurt animation and it can go horribly wrong from there, it usually does, I've seen too many artists/developers "wars" because of that.

One another thing is that modifying/completing assets is actually harder than what people might think. For example I've been trying to modify/create additions for what I needed for the jam but in the end I wasted too much time doing something that I can't do at all in the first place (linked files, didn't submit them because well... ironically, they're also incomplete).
This is why I usually avoid to frankenstein anything, it's usually worse and ends up bringing down the value of the original file. I'd hardly call that beneficial for the original artist and I think that most people think that way, or at least devs.

Anyway this is why I think that both challenges, art & game, are necessary. It might help to complete collections, but it's also a good opportunity for others to bring something to the table so that artists don't feel like they're the only one participating or doing all the work for free.

EDIT: Erf, actually the 2 first files are from another jam attempt (lowres). The ones I made for the OGA jam are the ogaworld ones. But as you can see, I've been trying.

@chasersgaming:

>  You mentioned about not fully knowing what assets are needed when creating assets, so this sort of feedback is essential isn't it?

Not really because the kind of assets I was referring to are specific to the game.  So yeah, it's essential for the dev whose trying to realize /his/ or /her/ project, but it's not necessary or even really all that useful for the artist.  Experience doesn't really teach you much here except to expect something to be needed.   Best example I can think of off hand are enemy creatures and boss monsters.  It really depends alot on what kind of game you're making what sort of enemies you'll want and what kind of poses and animations they'll need. 

> This feedback can be taking wrongly if worded wrongly, and it shouldn't be seen as a demand for something

No but it is an ask.  You are asking someone who has already done something for you (for free!) to do more.  All the buttery prose in the world can't change that.

As Kuranyem says, sometimes these conversations go well but more often than not they go completely sideways.

As a dev, I've been on the other side of it plenty of times.  When you put something out there there's no end to the number requests and suggestions you get.  You want to be accomodating and for your stuff to useful for folks, but you can't honor every request and after awhile just being asked for more can get tiring. 

I actually think it's a good sign that you don't see a lot of 'could you add...' requests on OGA.  Too much of that would be toxic and choke off new submissions.

Ultimately, OGA is not a place for devs to go and order up art for their games.  The solution for that is called hiring an artist and paying them to make /your/ art in service of /your/ vision for /your/ game. 

I think the only way it works is with a collaborative model.  One persons starts something, and other people contribute the pieces they need or are interested in making.  That's how all good open source projects operate and endure. 

> So maybe it is an idea to have a baseline of criteria for a certain style of assets and a suggestion of a Minuim requirements to aid that asset

I could see a few docs or tutorials linked from the submision guidelines being perhaps helpful.

Just something that kind of goes over the basics of what pieces are typically needed to make a 'complete' game.   I'll bet if we googled around we'd even find a few existing tutorials that covered the basics pretty well.  Just having links there might help new comers.

I don't think there's much to be gained by taking it further than that and I certainly wouldn't support adding any additional 'requirements' for art submissions.

Again, just to repeat myself, I see this as a 'challenge devs face when using OGA works' not a 'problem OGA needs to solve'.  

I think it would be great if the challenges and game jams could help foster some collaborative spirit around OGA works, but I don't think they have to be re-worked specifically to solve these problems.  TBH, they are doing a decent enough job at it as is.

@Kuranyem:

> One another thing is that modifying/completing assets is actually harder than what people might think.

I definitely understand that.  I've worked myself up to being able to muddle by on simple 16x16, low color stuff, but there's alot of stuff on OGA that's just way beyond my skill level to even tinker with.  And that's natural, some folks are artist and some folks are developers, and the lucky ones get it all :)   

So I agree, again I don't think it's OGA's problem to solve, but it's definitely a valid point and one for people to hear and try to understand.

> First to bring some more art in OGA, because it lost a bit of steam for the past year

Is that true?  From where I sit OGA seems to be doing better than ever.  It definitely comes and goes in waves at times, but I am continually amazed by the amount of high quality work that shows up on the 'new submissions' page every week.

@all:

Getting back to the game jam...

Well, I kind of like the idea of requiring that everything for game jam entries either be taken from or made available on OGA, but on the other hand, we've been doing fine as is, so I don't know that there's any great urgency to change it.

Perhaps just adding a theme and requiring 2 assets from the art challenges is enough of a change for now.

Once nice part is that this takes the 'challenge' and 'theme' bits out of the subjective ranking part and moves them in the requirements part.   That would certainly make the ranking part easier, as you could just play the game and focus on rating that and not worrying about tracking back what assets it used.

Another thought I had was to maybe expand the categories a bit.  I guess we don't want to do it to death, but IIRC this year we had:

playability

artwork

music

sound

story/narrative

overall

I'd like to see something added for 'polish' or 'completeness'.

I could also see changing 'playability' to 'gameplay'

To my mind, 'playability' seems to straddle both 'completeness' and 'gameplay'

for example,  a game that has great gameplay mechanics but crashes or has many bugs, how 'playable' is that?

I suppose we could spin forever on names for these, but that was my two cents after rating the games this year.

@chasersgaming:

Yikes!  Sorry, I knew I was waxing philosophic for a bit there but I didn't meant to cause any head trauma!

Take it easy and get some rest.   Honestly, you can just ignore this entire thread and run the jam exactly the same next year and it'll still be totally awesome all over again! :)

@withthelove tbh I think that would be better.

Guess I can agree with @withthelove too.

Well, firstly, great job people. I feel like the length/quality of the submissions kinda leaped ahead this year. I got swallowed up by life the last week of ratings, so I'm sorry I missed rating/reviewing a few games and missing the OGA favorite voting. But we did play all the games, some a few times and some we still play :D

I personally didn't find anything wrong with in-game credits. Linking each assets page would be overwhelming, at least in game but a run of the mill credits screen should be a must. Honestly, I loved making the credits screen in psychopomp.

As for art challenge being a requirement, I might initially be turned off by that, but then again, revisions is a thing so it might not be that bad. But if you don't have art skills to modify stuff to your needs/aesthetics, it might hurt, but jams have themes and caveats, and that is more friendly than a few jams I've done this year.

The only complaint I have was already adressed; theme and challenge should probably be scrapped next year. Other than that, if you ran it the same next year, I'm sure it'd be fine. The OGA jams are the most relaxed ones I've done, which is why it's been my favorite. Though, it being my first (last year), it set some unrealistic expectations of the 2nd game jam I tried lol 48 hours, everything from scratch, must be less than 10mb etc.

Anyway, thank you all for the race and thanks Chaser for hosting the jam again.

I still need to finish psychopomp and deymoun, in the first one, beacuse you can't save, and in the second one I gave up trying to beat the boss after a while.

Anyone who has actually beaten the boss in Deymoun?

I didn't even finish The Legend Of Sara :P 

> The OGA jams are the most relaxed ones I've done, which is why it's been my favorite.

That's a good point.  I will say that despite my earlier lobbying for some stricter requirements, I do like that the OGA jam has a more laid back flavor than many other jams.  Some jams really feel like they are stretching for a gimmic with their rules, and I'm glad the OGA jam isn't that way.