Jams of the Timescape #3 | Kick-Off

Oh, it’s ready! Let me just get the theme from the oven…The theme for Jams of the Timescape: Volume 3 is… One year of Draw Steel!

Hello, everyone!

Today is Draw Steel’s first anniversary and the start of the third edition of Jams of the Timescape, a Draw Steel game jam organized by Jon de Nor and I.

In this video I’m going to answer your most important questions about the event: what’s a game jam, what are the rules, how our new ranking system works, and, obviously, what are the prizes.

But, if you don’t want to hear my voice anymore, you can just head over to TimescapeJams.com to enter the Jam and to join our Discord server where you can chat with other participants.

Ok, for starters, what is a game jam? Well, game jams are events where participants make games or game supplements from scratch with a deadline.

In Jams of the Timescape, jammers make Draw Steel-compatible products and submit them on Itch.io. Our events are all beginner friendly and the main goals are to have fun and develop some game design skills.

To spice it up a little, entries are then ranked and the top three win some nice goodies. But that’s secondary, because just participating is a blast!

Ok, so how does this Jam work? Unlike our previous editions, this time we’re not telling you what to make. You’re free to submit any Draw Steel-compatible product as long as it fits the theme and follows the rules.

Do you want to make a birthday cake ancestry? You got it. Do you want to make complications for each zodiac sign? Sure. Do you want to make a monster for each season? Do it.

Again, your submission just has to loosely fit the theme “One Year of Draw Steel” and follow the rules.

And what are the rules? They’re pretty straightforward: you can only submit one product, it must be a PDF document with two pages at most, it has to be created originally for the jam, and it must remain free or pay-what-you-want on Itch until the voting phase is over.

Besides these rules, your product should, of course, follow the Draw Steel Creators License, not use any AI, and not contain any bigoted content.

You’ll note that the rules don’t stop you from having collaborators, so feel free to join other creators on the Discord if you need some help.

And another great tip for beginners is submitting your entry as soon as possible and then updating your product on Itch as you revise it. This way there’s a smaller risk of something going wrong at the last minute.

For example, if someone notices that your PDF has three pages instead of two, you can still fix that before the deadline! Don’t leave your submission to the last second.

But speaking of deadlines, what are the important dates for this event? The Jam itself has already begun, so you can get started now!

Then, you have until August 21st to make your submission. At that point, voting will start and y’all have until August 28th to rate each other’s entries.

Finally, on September 04th, I’ll post a video announcing the three winners here on my channel.

And how are the winners going to be chosen? Ok, this is one of the major departures from our previous editions, so listen up!

Because last time we had so many entries, the judges simply couldn’t go through all of them. So this time we want the jammers themselves — you — to vote on each other.

Once voting opens, you’ll be assigned five entries at random. After you read each of them, you’ll see four different criteria to grade on a five-star scale: Usability, Creativity, Enjoyment, and Theme.

You can then grade more entries, but these five random ones are the minimum. So you should not have to read more than 10 pages, which I think is pretty doable in a week.

Anyway, the criteria are, of course, deeply personal and that’s totally fine! We’re hoping that the wisdom of the crowds balances stuff out, we’ll see.

You’ll also note that there is no criteria for art and this is on purpose. This time we’re trying to focus on words, not presentation. If your submission is readable, we’re happy with it.

Ok, once voting is done, the grades are averaged out and the three submissions with the best average grades are crowned the winners.

And what do the top-three ranked entries get? Well, thanks to our amazing sponsor, Tabletop Nonsenseverse, we have some great prizes waiting for you.

Third place gets issues 1 through 6 of the Blacksmith’s Guild, while second place gets all currently published issues.

But first place wins all currently published issues of the Blacksmith’s Guild and a 12-month subscription to their Patreon.

Again, thank you so so much to Tabletop Nonsenseverse for sponsoring this edition of the Jams of the Timescape.

And, I think that’s everything I had to say! If you have any more questions, please join our Discord server with the link in the description and ask away.

See you all for the winners’ video, thank you very much, and goodbye.