Kieran and I were unable to take part in Ludum Dare #22, despite really wanting to. So we cooked up a plan to do our own Jam, at a later date. That later date is from midnight tonight, and since announcing it a couple of people have expressed an interest in joining us in our quest.
Great! But in the interest of consistency, here are the rules in full:
1) The Jam will start at midnight tonight UK time, i.e. as soon as friday begins, the jam begins. It will run for 72 hours.
2) The theme of the Jam will be announced as close to midnight as possible, and will be randomly chosen from a selection of the top Ludum Dare #22 themes that came out of the theme voting. It will be posted on the @SurplusGamer Twitter account.
3) The submission rules are the same as the Ludum Dare Jam Rules, i.e. fairly relaxed - you should aim to stick to the theme, but you can work in teams, use old code/assets if you like. Personally, we’ll be starting from as-scratch-as-possible, and we think it’s more fun that way. But as long as you upload it somewhere where people can download and play it before the end of the 72 hours, you win!
And now the twist:
4) We decided that since we’re making our own deadline, we needed a bit of an extra motivation. So, at the start of the Jam you must set aside £10 or the equivalent in your currency. If you succeed, you keep the money. If you fail, that money goes to a charity or other cause which accepts donations (such as a political party)
BUT
The catch is, it has to be a cause you would not normally approve of, one that the very idea of giving money to makes you shudder with horror, one that will sufficiently motivate you to succeed!
And finally, a suggestion: if the idea of doing a Jam in aid of not giving money to charity feels a little too mean spirited to you, we suggest the following variant, which we like to call ‘Good Cause/Bad Cause.’ Simply put, if you succeed, it goes to a cause you like, if you fail, it goes to a cause you hate. I’m thinking of doing this one myself, and it may be the format of this jam if we decide to run it a more organised way in the future.
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We only ever arranged this as a way for us to do LD22 after having missed it, which is why there’s no proper page and we haven’t posted about it anywhere before. But if you’d like to join us at the last minute, do so, and use the #smacjam hashtag to mark your submissions/tweets about it so that we can keep track!
