It’s been a while since we’ve made any public announcements about Game Jolt Jams, despite a bunch of improvements having been implemented since its public unveiling.

Thanks to you, the jam organizers, participants, and voters, Game Jolt Jams has been more widely-used than we ever expected (okay, maybe we expected it a little). Your feedback and input has helped us to hone elements of the system and add new features like the latest… Awards!

So what can you do with Awards? Let’s look at a few possible scenarios:

• Maybe you want the community to rate games, but you also want to have a panel of judges pick their favorites and issue special awards.

• Perhaps you want participants to rate each other’s games, and you want a jury to hand out some wacky superlatives, as well.

• Or maybe you want to turn off community voting entirely and just give out some awards yourself.

Now you can handle all of that, and any permutations thereof, easy squeezy. Also lemon peasey.

It works pretty simply. You just create awards before, during, or even after the jam, then you choose what game or games win each of them. You can name your awards, give them descriptions, and decide the order in which they’ll appear after the jam. You can even decide the order of games within each award, should multiple games win the same one.

Assign your awards before the voting period ends, and they’ll be displayed in the list of entries and on each game’s jam page automatically at the close of voting, along with any ranked results from community voting (if applicable).

So, have fun coming up with some cool awards for your jams! There are some classics you could use, like Grand Prize, 1st Place, Best Audio, Judges’ Choice, and so on. Or you could create some that are tailored to the theme of your jam. You can be serious or silly with Awards. Let your imagination run wild!

As always, we will treasure any feedback we get about the Awards feature, or about any other aspect of Game Jolt Jams. We are devoting most of our resources to #GameJoltNext now, but we will always continue to tweak and polish Jams, and for that we need your help.

THANK YOU!

#jams #gjbroadcast