Game Jolt tends to do jams a little bit differently than other sites/jams, but the choices and decisions are not done on a whim. We’ve ran many jams and most of the “oddities” are our solutions to certain problems we’ve encountered over the years.

Some of this is pulled from the FAQ that was on the Jam site, but I’ll reiterate anyway.

Only jam participants should be able to vote.

In regards to only participants being able to vote. That is an option for organizers to do in the publicly-usable Game Jolt Jams system. Many jams do it that way but we decided against it for this jam. Here is the reason from the FAQ:

This jam is all about getting everyone involved and having fun. Restricting voting to people who submit a game would go against the spirit of the jam. In addition, it would make the jam less about “fun for all” and more about making a game that appeals to other developers. If the challenge of the jam is to make a game that’s fun to watch, then are developers really the best judges? Their opinions are important, of course, but aren’t the opinions of regular folks and Let’s Players, regardless of their subscriber count, just as (if not more) important?

The key being that we didn’t want to make yet another jam that only involves developers. We want everyone to get involved. Gamers and YouTubers and streamers want to join in on the action as well and have their opinions matter. It’s what this jam was about! All the streaming that people did was not just for other developers, but for gamers that have never seen games getting built before. Looping everyone in to jams is something that is very important to me. Which is why I built the system the way I did, with livestreams, activity feeds, and giving the ability for anyone to vote.

You shouldn’t announce a jam theme before the jam begins.

This was brought up a few times for different reasons, so I’ll answer ‘em below.

I think it was a big mistake to announce theme and rules before jam has been started. I’ve seen a lot of entries submitted in first day, it’s obviously that they violated rules and made their games before official start of the jam

We announced the “theme” early because we haven’t seen that themes actually do anything in practice to dissuade cheating. In all our contests people always start early. Also, Game Jolt official jams tend to be different than other jams you may be used to. We encourage devs to upload placeholder games early so that they can get into the Activity Feed and post updates on their games as they do them. There also was a few cheaters that tagged their games just to get publicity and views, but again, that happens with all jams we run, and we were quick to remove people we found guilty.

My one complaint would be that the jam theme was posted too far in advance - not because it meant that people could start early - but because it means people think my entry is too polished, and must have been made beforehand.

Even if we did announce a theme later, they could still say you used assets you had made previously, and mechanics and code and most things from before. It never stops the “cheater, cheater!” name calling. Some people have a hard time understanding what can truly be done in 3 days for the experienced jammer.

Don’t reveal the jam theme at the start of the countdown to the jam XD For various reasons (cheating mainly).

This other Fireside post outlines more of our thoughts around cheaters in jams: http://fireside.gamejolt.com/post/cheaters-don-t-win-game-jams-b49yppgp

Voting sucks, it should use the Game Jolt rating system instead of being on the jam pages!

It’s much more complicated than this. The issue is that Game Jolt Jams is a separate system than Game Jolt. Game Jolt is the game host, and GJ: Jams is the jam host. We developed a public system that anyone can use so that we can share our tools with others and give everyone the ability to run a jam.

Why can’t we just use Game Jolt site ratings for the jam ratings? Well, for one, the two systems work completely different. If you go to the Jams landing page: http://jams.gamejolt.com/ and scroll down to the Voting Made Easy section, you’ll notice that it talks about being able to create multiple voting categories to vote in. You can also see a picture of the multiple category form on the left. We chose not to do voting categories to keep it simple.

The other issue is that you typically want rating to be separate for the jam since jam entries are very often light/stripped-down/buggy versions of games that eventually get built out more. You may not appreciate that your game has low ratings on Game Jolt because of a buggy jam entry if they are voting there instead of on the jam site. And again, the rating system is more complex with jams. It does a weighted average for the results that takes into account number of ratings. This is so that games that have a single rating of 5 don’t get a better overall than a game with three 5s and one 4. There’s also cheat detection for upvoting/downvoting other entries, and weighting for how many games a user has voted on in the jam (since someone that has played more entries is more likely to have a more educated opinion on the true scores of the entries in the jam).

We should have had a message on the game pages letting people know to also vote on the jam page for entries of the #indiesvspewdiepie jam and we eventually did put that up within the first day of voting. There’s still 5 days left, and plenty of gamers flowing through every day.