Greetings all.

It's that time of year again for another Summer game jam. Comes round so quick, and this is its 4th outing, that's 4 years! where has all that time gone? In that time we have seen the introduction of 3 more game jams as well which is fantastic, more games being created using the assets here on OGA! and the Art challenges being more frequent, it's great to see the community here getting involved and participating.

OK, last years jam had prizes and 'category' winners, and i wasn't sure how this was going to go down, but thankfully it went well and didn't create any problems and i didn't receive any negative feedback, so i am going to run the same prizes again this year. they are not massive awards, but it's just a little something.

There is a new prize added to the jam this year, 'Best Coverage'. Before the start of last years jam i reached out to a number of youtubers, streamers to see if they would cover the games in the jam. Sadly most didn't get back to me, or the ones that did had other schedules and couldn't do it. So i'm changing tack this year with this open approach to see what happens.:) Asset creators, Developers are not the only visitors or account holders here on OGA and figured its another opportunity or incentive for the community here to get involved and participate in another way if they can't or don't gamedev. I remember the first jam was covered by Jupitor Hadley, and the last couple of jams we have seen ZomBCool creating some cool videos, and its great to see the games being mentioned, played and spoken about in this way, and i'm sure the feedback received as a result is welcomed. This is open to everyone and anyone, including submitters and asset creators, so if you want to make a video on the games in the jam, be my guest! :) Voting for this will work the same as voting a favourite, just send me PM with the person/persons video in the subheading. :) for the video you think covered the games the best, and the videos much cover ALL the games in the jam, not just one or a few.. I will start taking votes on this as soon as the videos are published and last day will be 1 week after the voting has finished.(friday 7th august 2020).

With a nice steady momentum for participation on this jam, and others, i just want to turm my attention to 'Ratings'. I have been keeping an eye them over the years and think i'm going to change it back to how it was on the first jam. That is, only submitters can rate the games. I want to be able to keep an eye on them and encourage more rankings, and feel i can do this much better with the ratings set up this way. This will not effect who can play your games, the games will still be very much be playable by anyone, so you can still get the feedback needed or video/image posts from the itch communitys or public, jst that they will not be able to rate.just to be clear that, only participants that submit a game to the game jam will be able to rate other games in the game jam.

So, there you have the changes this year, i hope to see you there for this, any questions then ask away!. :)

The jam is now live and kicks off in just over a month, so go grab the assets you need, or create the assets you need, don't forget to share, sharings caring. and remember no coding until the jam starts. :)

Thanks to Xom Adept for creating the banner art for this game jam.

https://itch.io/jam/oga-summer-game-jam-4-2020