Make sure you read and follow them carefully so as not to accidentally disqualify your entry!
1. REGISTER : You must register your team by 11:00pm/23:00 Pacific Standard Time on 10/2/2013. [edit : you can add team members after registration]
2. SUBMIT : You must submit your game by 11:00pm/23:00 Pacific Standard Time on 10/10/2013.
Please make sure to hit the following link to get all the details on registration and submission:
3. TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS : Your game must adhere to the following rules:
| • | Your game must be built with Unity. If you have already used a 30 day trial and cannot afford a Pro copy, you can go to RESOURCES to get a 30 day trial code. | |
| • |
You must provide a web player build with the screen dimensions equal to or less than 800 pixel width and 600 pixel height. | |
| • | If you want to go smaller, or do a square-shaped aspect ratio, you can as well. | |
| • | You can use Unity Asset Store assets. | |
4. EXCLUSIVITY PERIOD : Submitted Games will be exclusively playable on Skybound and All Out War Game Jam partner websites for 2 months (60 calendar days) from launch.
| • | We get to show off the winning games on www.TheWalkingDead.com and www.Eurogamer.net. | |
| • | After the 2 month period is up, you can do whatever you wish with your games. | |
| • | During development, we require that you only share the games privately / securely with your team for play testing. Please do not post them on a public website. | |
5. THE THEME + NAMING RULES : The theme and phrase for inspiration is “All Out War”. However, please do not name the game “All Out War” or “The Walking Dead” or have those phrases in your game name. You CAN use those phrases in your game description, just not your game name.
We chose this rule so not to create confusion in searches between our stuff and your games. Base it off the theme in term of words / phrase alone, but name it something different.
So if you were to create game about an All Out War on Pizza, you could call it “Pizzapocalypse”, but “An All Out War on Pizza” can only be used in your description text.
To be *even clearer* on this, you can use zombies, or you can not use zombies; that is up to you (We didn’t invent zombies). You can use the words of “All Out War” to be a literal idea, or an abstract one. You just can’t use the words as the game name, or the characters.
6. NO USE OF THE WALKING DEAD I.P : No use of The Walking Dead name, characters, stories, art or associated brands…
Pretty self-explanatory. Too many issues would arise for us legally, so we decided to keep this simple and disallow use of The Walking Dead and its world in the competition.
However, if you’d like to play around in the world of The Walking Dead, we recommend you pick up our Walking Dead Assault game on iOS / Android, or Telltale’s Walking Dead Episodes series.
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| iOS UNIVERSAL! | ANDROID! | |||
Now that you’ve read the rules, have you registered yet? If not, go here. If you’ve already done that and want to see what Resources we’ve put together for you, go here.
No Flash? 🙁
Flash is a dead technology, sorry
this is the most idiotic comment i’ve ever read. Not even gonna discuss
Flash is a Walking Dead Plataform.
Well that was at least a creative take on the idea.
I would not consider it dead; merely more limited in publishable scope than a Unity-built game would be.
Flash is still great for web games and fast prototyping. Great fun to build stuff in as well.
All this and Unity can build to flash and pretty much any other platform in existence if need be.
So, theme is “All Out War”. NO USE OF THE WALKING DEAD I.P. Got it. But game genre is up to devs? And what about background story? And zombies? Does every entry need zombies? Or is any game made according to the theme (somehow related to “a war using all available resources”) ok for the compo?
Game Genre is up to devs!
You do not need any zombies!
Theme is “All Out War” as a VERY loose theme.
For example, it could be a Bullet Hell Shooter that is an All Out War on Pizzas, you could call Pizzapocalypse. Or a serious game about the horrors of an All Out World War, that could just be an art game piece.
I’ll make sure to add this to the page…
Thanks Nico!
Thanks to you for the info regarding our questions. Cheers!
S’ok!
Why no Flash? : (
Promotional reasons. If we get enough requests, we’ll see what we can do about changing that restriction.
Please open the development to Flash. With Unity game devs can cheat through using the Asset store and buying scripts. Albeit, there are flash stores, it is much more difficult to buy scripts for flash compared to Unity’s asset store. Unity is nice for building games, and is mostly done using C#, it’s still allowing devs to buy prepacked skins, code, and stuff. Flash also works on web platforms and can be used to be ported to mobile through Flex, and Adobe Air.
Hi NSA.
Agreed that Flash has many strong points as well. I’ve personally found it great for fast coding and it’s still a great web gaming platform (as proven by sites like Kongregate and Miniclip, and amazing studios like Nitrome).
There are issues using Flash through WordPress that we encountered in tests. We found Unity Webplayer to be least problematic, which was a surprise to me, but made the decision skew in Unity’s favor.
We also wanted the GameJam to allow developers to be able to realize design concepts easier, so focusing on Unity meant people could use Asset Store tools to get to concept realization quickest. Whilst most game jams are a challenge of fast coding alongside fast and focused design, we wanted to open this up to allow design to get more breathing room.
The Flash comments have been coming a lot more than I had anticipated, so I’m taking this seriously and I’ll consult with our partners on it.
you got to be kidding me as if there arent any flash cheats. Flash has been around for over a decade longer then unity.
Guys – to be clear, we don’t consider this a cheat. It’s about realizing a great design. If you are crazy enough to buy $10,000 worth of tools to do it in a two week jam, then power to you, but we’re looking for design creativity, and most tools you can buy don’t provide that; they tend to provide a basic genre framework and nothing more.
The whole point of this jam is making a game can be done by any means (within reason), by anyone. What if someone who isn’t a programmer would like to take part in this as a one person team? Are you saying that they should know how to program to enter?
Unity is a fantastic tool that many people find useful. I am sure that games companies use packages from the asset store in their games.
Flash is a dead technology, sorry 🙂
That’s a pretty uneducated and inappropriate opinion.
Sorry : )
Proove me wrong.
Almost no mobile platforms are supporting it, i have flash disabled everywhere and i see no difference, it eats up pretty much memory, there’s almost(!) no good flash-based games out there, only crappy ones and only couple of good ones
Plz, admit it, and dont use it, i beg u
See? you are uneducated in the topic.
A lot of games in the iTunes Store and Google Play Store are made with Adobe Air, which is Flash.
By example, Tiny Thief published by Rovio last month was made with Flash Pro + Autodesk Scaleform.
Please document yourself before posting this nonsense.
I beg you.
A lot? come on 🙂 Machinarium and Tiny Theif, lol 🙂 plz shtap
If you can’t understand that it is not the tool, but what you do with it, then I’m sorry for you.
I’m out of this conversation, it will just get repetitive.
Good luck with your life.
Bye.
ahah, looser, go make another useless flash-game 🙂 good luck.
I hope no one will play it
Hey man you don’t have to be rude.
Flash is a dead technology in regards to web development purposes. However, many companies that are VC backed with millions in capital run flash with the adobe air compiler such as Tweet Deck. And it’s still kicking for game development. Most Facebook games are Flash. Many notable games have been built in Flash. Journey for instance was made in flash to prototype its mechanics of the character following the player. It still has many uses.
So please don’t be an ignorant person when it comes to Flash. Also please stop jumping on the bandwagon that “Flash is dead”. It’s not. Simply put, HTML-5 and Javascript games won’t catch on because it only supports local storage for the time being. Unity is nice and all, but the fact of the matter is Unity doesn’t teach you to be ready for the game industry. It’s a graphical tool that allows most devs to piece things together without having to know what they’re doing for the most part. In Flash you can’t get away with the leniency that Unity offers.
You have clearly never used Unity in your life.
Actually, I have. I’ve actually given a talk on Unity for iOS at the GDC.
Is it in the Vault?
I personally see some problems here,
Since this is a *The Walking Dead* game jam, it should have some connection to The Walking Dead theme. I understand the “No use of the IP names & characters”, but you need to provide a theme that’s related to your IP in some way. Will the game have zombies in it? I could interpret “All Out War” as a game where I shoot alien hordes in the future, I am pretty sure that is not of your utmost interest. It could help if the theme gave more of a hint like “The Infected – All out War”.
It would be useful if instead of just that plain “Resources” page, you provided us with an array of actual The Walking Dead themed resources (models, sprites, icons, sounds, music) to helps us.
Not every developer uses Unity to develop their game. There’s GameMaker Studio, Flash, Construct, Stencyl, Cocos2D and many more so unless Unity did a promotion through this jam, I see no reasoning adding this restriction, making a game in Unity will not automatically make it good.
I think you should revise you rules, that way more people will be interested to take part in this. 🙂
Hi Alex;
Actually, you shooting Aliens in the future is fine. The theme is loose and by name / word only. I’ll make a stronger point of that in the text above.
And Unity was a preference due to our promotional relationship with Unity for this jam. If we hear enough feedback to the negative, we may talk with them and change that, but we went with Unity for that main reason.
Anyway – thanks for your thoughts. Every piece of feedback helps.
No problem 🙂 Thank you for the clarifications!
No problem. Thanks for speaking up!
You can’t just specify a tool to use like “Unity”, (especially Unity). That’s not how game jams work. worst game jam attempt ever 🙂
Well sadly, we also have our technical need to get the games playable on the website, and WordPress can be a pain on anything other than Unity Player and Flash. Even Flash is hard to embed.
Still, we’re listening to all the feedback. So thanks.
Actually, that is how a Game Jam can work. The parameters of the Game Jam are set by the person or association hosting it. They can do whatever they’d like. 🙂
Hmm, not what I expected this jam to be. Since it’s pretty open, what was the inspiration for hosting this jam? Just for fun?
We wanted to have fun, but give the winners something tangible in the form of a larger scale of exposure than it typically seen for notable Game Jam-made games.
October for us is a HUGE time of year. Especially this year with Season 4 of the TV show debuting, the new All Out War comic arc starting, and some other stuff going on with our games.
And with Robert giving the grand prize winner his endorsement, and Eurogamer Expo offering us a launch platform, the timing just seemed perfect to realize this.
Hope that clears things up. 🙂
This sounds great! Should be a lot of fun. Already tossing around ideas. Thanks!
Glad to hear it, and happy to have you!
No problem!
Sounds interesting and my interest is definitely piqued, but I don’t really see the point of entry.
I can’t see any prizes or incentives, so it’s kind of hard to justify investing the amount of time needed to smash out a game.
Especially considering that we can’t use the IP and you are demanding exclusivity for 2 months, I’m wondering what the point of this jam is.
Hi Luke;
There are prizes of course, as outlined above.
However, what we feel is the biggest prize is the exposure we can give to the games and game makers. We’ll be showcasing the games during our biggest month of the year, and the grand prize winner will receive Robert’s public endorsement, which will open many doors for said winner.
Let me know if you have any other questions.
Thanks for pointing that out, Daniel.
I came here via a direct link on an indie developers page, so I didn’t see the other page that talked about prizes until I googled the jam.
We had already registered and started work on our entry, but the prizes are a nice bit of incentive to make sure we finish it in time. (I like doors)
Cheers.
No worries Luke. Happy to help. 🙂
Hallo! Is this open to the world?
Yes!
So what is the procedure for adding team members?
Do it, then just send us the update to the email so we can add them to your team list. Once you’ve registered, you can add team members.
Let me ask for a clarification on this section here:
“We get to show off the winning games on http://www.TheWalkingDead.com and http://www.Eurogamer.net.”
Does that mean we grant an exclusivity to publish materials on the game, or the game itself=? Furthermore, if we do have to publish the game, do we need to update it beyond the initial gamejam version?
Reason I’m asking is because some of us might want to keep working on our projects after the gamejam, but not necessarily to publish them on thewalkingdead/eurogamer.
We only have the exclusive right to display the game for play through our websites for the period we outlined above.
That simply means our websites are the only place you’ll be able to play the games, during that period.
After this period, you can do whatever you like. 🙂 And even during it, you can work on your game in the background, in your secret game development lair. 🙂
I hope that’s clear…
Are we allowed to post work-in-progress threads to personal blogs? Or do you want us holding off from that, too? If so, when could we make our notes public? When it launches, or after the exclusivity period? Thanks!
As long as the WIP are screengrabs, or audio teases, but not gameplay builds (you can share those, in private channels to your game testers, but please make sure these are not accessible outside of your team). And after the period is over, you can post everything and anything. 🙂
While I have been working with Unity several years I am new to the whole game jam idea. Would anyone have suggestions as to where I might go to find a team that needs some help.
Dylen; head to the Google Event page – https://plus.google.com/events/cjs85bkbpkamb2arm9fj3bh1gm4 and we also set up a Neogaf thread – http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?p=84372649 ; that should help 🙂
Anyone needs music? :3 Happy Cat is here to save the day! https://soundcloud.com/ryana
Happy Cat! Please share your offer on the Google Event page! https://plus.google.com/events/cjs85bkbpkamb2arm9fj3bh1gm4 The teams will really appreciate the offer, I assure you!
Registration is now closed! 130 of you are now in All Out War! Congratulations! Can’t wait to see what you guys make!
So, I’m looking for submission instructions. Already asked about it on the Google Event page, but figured here was a good place to ask as well. What should be included in the deliverables and where should we submit them? Thanks!
N/m, found them. Instructions are on the registration page.