Jam Info
Welcome to the first /vrg/ Game Jam!
VR has reclined. 95% of anons only put on the face brick to sit around in a VRChat world. However, recent events have proved that if you put a game in their chat, there’s at least some gamer still left in ‘em. The horse will drink if you lead it to water. Yet, there only so many games out there. We need more!
Here’s your chance to make a game that anons would enjoy. Make a game prefab that can be included in a VRChat world, and submit the prefab to us. We’ll make an Exhibition world with all the submitted prefabs, host instance(s) for the thread, and anons will vote on the submissions most worthy for our lavish set of prizes.
Gamedev is hard! We’ve made a new framework you can use to make prefab games: the Mini Udon Game Interface (Mugi). You’re not required to use it, but it’ll help a lot.
How to Participate
Section titled “How to Participate”- Just like make (prefab) game
- Submit the prefab using our tool in the Unity Editor.
- Show up to the Exhibition, vote on submissions, win silly prizes.
Sound good? Check out Getting Started if you want to jump in, or read on for more details.
The jam theme is “Party Minigames”, a la Mario Party. So ideally something goofy, short, and multiplayer. It’s a jam though, so interpret the theme however you want!
The main rules are:
- We (the organizers) have to be able to figure out how to include your submission in the Exhibition.
- Your submission must:
- Fit in a 20x20x20 cube (unity units)
- Be <50MB.
- Behave itself in a world with other stuff in it.
You can make multiple submissions. You can work individually or as a team. We recommend teams, especially if you’re doing a multiplayer game; you’ll really want multiple people for testing.
See Jam Rules for full requirements and guidelines.
Schedule
Section titled “Schedule”The Exhibition Event will be on September 6th (exact times TBD).
“Completed” submissions are due September 1st, to give us time for final integration and testing. We will accept small bugfixes/revisions/polish up to September 5th, but it’ll be too late to change anything major.
Meetups/Checkins
Section titled “Meetups/Checkins”We’ll host some meetups in VRChat where you can complain to the organizers, ideafag with the other anons, and maybe tour some existing game worlds for ideas. As we get closer to the end we’ll also try to do some testing for WIP games and the WIP Exhibition world.
The first meetup will be Friday at 9pm EDT (UTC 01:00), with instance posted in the thread. Later meetups TBD.
Exhibition
Section titled “Exhibition”At the end of the jam, we’ll host instances of the Exhibition world (exact time/date TBD).
While the layout of the world is still TBD, it’ll be something like a Virtual Market world. We’ll lay out your submissions in the world and people can walk between them to try them out. Really big submissions that use the full 20x20x20 space may get packed onto the same place in the world, with toggles for one at a time (like the Virtual Market cube worlds).
The Exhibition for the event will be a private/unlisted world. If we do publish a version publicly to VRChat later, we’ll contact submitters to clear everything beforehand.
Judgment
Section titled “Judgment”During the event, anons will be able to try out all the games. Everyone who has submitted something will then get to rate other submissions (Gamedev is hard. Your comrades will be your most charitable judges.)
Submitted games will be rated on the following criteria:
- Theme Incorporation: How “party minigame” is it?
- Fun: how fun is it to play/watch?
- Originality: How original is the idea/mechanics?
- VR Usage: how well does it use VR (and potentially FBT)?
- Aesthetics: How well does it look/sound/feel?
Other anons at the exhibition will also get to vote for a separate “People’s Choice” award; possibly on the same criteria, details TBD.
Awards
Section titled “Awards”The real prize is the Domains we Reloaded along the way. We’ll also have some funny trophies and badges for the highest average ratings in each criterion, as well as the best of show across all criteria.
This is an amateur event, so we don’t have any cash prizes. However, your prefabs are also fully yours (even if you use the Mugi framework). Feel free to sell them on booth or gumroad or whatever.
Why does it have to be a prefab?
Section titled “Why does it have to be a prefab?”There are plenty of decent game worlds in VRChat already, and it’s hard enough dragging anons to those. Prefab games are the lowest friction way to get the spawn-sitters to actually do something. We can improve society somewhat.
Prefab games sound hard to make though.
Section titled “Prefab games sound hard to make though.”Once you get into it, making VRChat prefabs is fairly similar in difficulty to making avatars, just with historically worse documentation. We’re hoping our new docs on this site will help. Give the tutorial a shot.
We will also try our best to make your prefabs actually work in the Exhibition World. So if you’ve ever wanted to make some prefabs, now’s your chance to access to most willing beta testers you’ll ever have.
Can I submit a world instead?
Section titled “Can I submit a world instead?”Yes. Submit a prefab to us with a portal to your world and whatever advertising props you want as a “booth”, and we’ll set it up in the world somewhere.
You should still try to get your game working as a prefab! It’ll be a lot easier for people to play and rate your game if you do.
Can I submit a standalone VR game instead?
Section titled “Can I submit a standalone VR game instead?”Yes. Submit a prefab with some sort of link to your game (e.g. itch.io page) and whatever advertising props you want.
I made some cool assets but making the rest of the game was too hard…
Section titled “I made some cool assets but making the rest of the game was too hard…”Arrange what you’ve got into a “booth” and we’ll put it in the world. It’ll still be nice to see your assets.
I have this great idea but no time to make an actual working game, can I still submit something?
Section titled “I have this great idea but no time to make an actual working game, can I still submit something?”Make a jpeg with your game idea on it, post it in the thread, and we’ll stick it on the ideas guy wall.
What about all these flowers I made for the last event where the organizer was totally going to integrate everything?
Section titled “What about all these flowers I made for the last event where the organizer was totally going to integrate everything?”Sure, we’ll take ‘em and put ‘em somewhere in the world. If nothing else, we’re pretty sure we can handle prefabs.
So, uh, this is a """game""… ""jam""""??
Section titled “So, uh, this is a """game""… ""jam""""??”Yea, it’s more like a… Prefab Market, but we’re committed to the name at this point.
What happened to all the oddly specific requirements about VR and Multiplayer?
Section titled “What happened to all the oddly specific requirements about VR and Multiplayer?”A previous version of the jam info had a whole bunch of MUSTs in it. We’ve reworked those as guidelines and judging criteria that’ll score well rather than absolute requirements, which is much more jam-like in spirit.
If you already started working on a 2-8 player game with VR mechanics and clear winners/losers, don’t worry, we didn’t rugpull you. Your game will rate highly in judging.
But are you actually going to make a Mario Party world with all the prefabs?
Section titled “But are you actually going to make a Mario Party world with all the prefabs?”That is the vision that got muddled up in the first version of this jam: some sort of board game world that’d tie all the submitted minigames together. Which would be cool, but we ran out of time to make a framework robust enough to make this feasible. Thus, you get the Cope Prefab Market instead.
The Mario Party world is still a good idea! We may still do it in the future. It’ll likely be more like a “collab project” than a “game jam” though. If that sounds interesting to you, we’ll be scouting talent at the exhibition.