(Mirrored from my own blog: http://amcookie.weebly.com/home/rhythm-jam-postmortem-a-modest-success) After GameJolt finished the Glitch Jam they asked on Twitter if anyone else was interested in using their jam system. I had this cool idea for a jam for a while, where developers would make a rhythm game. I sent a mail to GameJolt with my plans, and they kindly gave me the keys to their Jam system.

Once I was in, I got started quickly- thanks to GameJolt’s support of the Markdown makeup language, I could copy all my existing plans fairly quickly (I use Writer for all my text needs). As you might already know, GameJolt’s Jam system is pretty epic. In some ways, it’s just like making a web page, with some extra underlying mechanics.

I wrote a very extensive page of resources, detailing how one would get the music for his/her game listing software to make music with, how one does actually make a rhythm game by implementing BPM into a game, and a large list of rhythm games. I also updated it regularly before the jam started.

Then GameJolt made it’s jam system available for the public. I’d figured it would happen sometime, and I also agree that it was quite finished at the time I started using it, but it resulted in a flood of jams where the mine was caught up in. As of speaking, there are 70 jams going on, so it’s pretty hard to pop out of the masses. Luckily there are some great concepts trying to use the mass as a positive thing, such as JNyknn’s Multijam.

I revealed the Jam one week before it started. It generated a bit of hype on Twitter, Wrathikal wrote a bit of news (just like he did for Cloud Chap back then!), and then it went quiet. The jam started very slowly.

I’d nearly given up all hope, just until the first jam game came to my attention. I directly learnt my mistake this way: developers like a jam to be rather short, instead of the month I gave it in the first place. See Ludum Dare, by far the most popular ‘game jam’, which is only 48/72 hours long. Also, developers rather make the game page for their game after the actual game is finished, instead of making one while the game is still in development. A few days later, Circular was entered. I decided it was time to promote the jam a bit more. In the end there where three games entered, with one game entered late during voting, ending in a total of four.

GameJolt’s Jam system has Google Analytics integrated, so that resulted in some nice stats! As you should know, I love stats and I like to share stats, and as you most likely know, Google Analytics is the perfect tool to gather stats. (I would really wish GameJolt would get that integrated as well.) Here are the sessions and pageviews of the Jam: <a>

</a> The first text bubble stands for the announcement of the jam, the second indicates it’s start, the third indicates it’s end and the fourth indicates the day that the voting ended. The graph starts at the 11th of Juli and ends at the 1st of September.

Next, let me explain some of the spikes on the graph.

On the 8th of August, a tweet was put out by @IndieGameJams: “More people NEED To enter the #rhythmjam http://jams.gamejolt.io/rhythmjam/games @contralogic ” …which was retweeted quite some times. This resulted in a spike in sessions both the 8th and the 9th, which is a bit odd for a tweet, but hey, all is welcome. Most of the pageview spikes you see are the result of @IndieGameJams, to be exact on the 20th of Juli and the 11th of August, so once again I am very grateful towards Jupiter Hadley who runs the account.

As you can see, It’s hard to get people to vote on the jam games. This is mainly because of the interface on jams.gamejolt.com. On top of the page, there are three categories- active, future and past Jams. In the active catergory, the jams that end the soonest are on the top of the page, and the jams that are in voting period are all the way at the bottom on the page. It would be more logical to put those games in a separate category, since it will most likely be the only interesting category for gamers to check out. Still, I’m very happy with the results of the voting, with the amazing Circular on the first place, the wacky Got The Funky Funky Flow as the number two, avocado game CodaCoda on third place, and interesting RE:bELL on the last place.

One last note on GameJolt’s Jam system: the tie-in between a game’s jam page and the actual game listing on GameJolt is very weak. You can’t play the game on it’s jam page, or at the very least download it, and the game’s description isn’t displayed on it’s jam page. Voting on a game jam game could also be tied in to rating on GameJolt, although that would be more difficult.

How I personally think about the Rhythm Jam? “Een bescheiden succes”, a modest success. I’m really happy with the results, although the jam hasn’t achieved the scope I had originally hoped for, but at the very least it wasn’t a complete failure, and that’s good!

Thanks again for all devs who entered a game: @Raicuparta , @contralogic , @LTP_ATS and @notivano, game journalist@Wrathikal and Youtuber @Jupiter_Hadley , and @GameJolt for being awesome in general. (For completions sake: I’m @AmazingcookieNL.)