We’re throwing a PunyInform game jam: PunyJam #1 - itch.io
It starts on 9 April, at which time the theme will also be announced.
Entries must be submitted by 2 May.
The voting period is 3-17 May.
Anyone can join to write a game and/or vote.
There will be at least one prize, but we don’t know what yet. You can also join without participating in the competition.
We will try to be insanely friendly and helpful to people wanting to participate. Let’s have fun creating games together!
Fantastic idea, but the timing is terrible. I believe ParserComp starts on 1 April 2021 and the Text Adventure Literacy Jam voting opens on 7 April 2021. Nevertheless, I’ll try to contribute something, even if it’s only a small game.
Are ports and translations permitted? I’m thinking of ports from old BASIC games, either obscure type-ins or unpublished, and translations from foreign language BASIC games to English.
Glad to see you’re interested!
Actually there’s more - Spring Thing voting lasts all through the jam, and LibreJam voting is 8-14 April. Parsercomp games should be submitted by the end of June I believe. And after that there’s IF Comp. And I’m sure there’ll be other comps or jams in the fall. I don’t think there’s a better time than this if we want to throw a jam in 2021, and life is too short to put it off to 2022. I talked to Adam Sommerfield (ParserComp) and Chris Ainsley (TALJ), and both thought this was as good a time as any to do this.
I do hope this will work more as a (welcome) kick in the butt for a few people to learn PunyInform and use it to create something, sharing and cooperating with others. The competition part is truly secondary, and jam entries that want to keep out of the rating process are just as welcome.
As for porting or translating an old game: The idea here is really to produce something new. The time frame is limited, and we’re definitely expecting shorter games - something that’s new, finished, not terribly buggy and provides 15 minutes of fun would be just great.
Also, a theme will be announced when the jam starts, next Friday. This is something that you will somehow need to include in the game. Hopefully it will work as an inspiration and get your imagination going.
But if you’ve written a game which hasn’t been circulated, and you find that it works with the theme, who are we to say you can’t use it?
Are you able to provide brief instructions on how to go about creating a game in Puny Inform? I’ve been using I7 for so long, I think the last game I made before that was in TADS 2 using something called Plugh…
Absolutely. I’ve written a series of articles and tutorials which can be found at https://github.com/johanberntsson/PunyInform#articles
If you haven’t used Inform 6, you may want to start with “PunyInform, Installing the tools and compiling a game”.
If you have used Inform 6 before and have the Inform 6.34 compiler setup, you probably want to start with PunyInform Coding 1.
There is also a minimal game included in the PunyInform distribution, called “minimal.inf”. You can start from that and add stuff.
And of course you linked to all these resources on the Jam page, which I’d have known if I’d bothered to read through it! Apologies and thanks 
We would have been happy to get one person entering the jam. Really. We now have eight, plus Johan and I. We’re overjoyed!
The “theme” (not even sure that’s the correct term) allows for many types of games. I hope we get a few more participants onboard when it’s announced (in 36 hours).
Don’t get your hopes up too high. It’s normal to only get a fraction of the registrants to actualy submit something. The Adventuron jams normally get about 25% submission rate. The Christmas jam was an exception, that got 50%. The current Text Adventure Literacy jam had up to 50 registrations at one point. A couple have dropped out, but there’s currently only 8 submissions. From the chatter on Discord, I’m expecting one or two more before it closes in about 4 hours. That will be a 20% submission rate. Mind you, the quality of most of the games (at least the ones I’ve played or tested) is outstanding!
Got it. But I reserve the right to be happy for now. 
We just released PunyInform v2.3. We thought it would be nice to have no known bugs in PunyInform when the PunyJam starts, 10 hours from now.
Absolutely! There’s no saying you won’t buck the trend and get 100% submission. I look forward to playing them.
PunyJam #1 is now on, and the theme has been announced!