The Short Games Showcase is now accepting entries!

Competitions
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The Short Games Showcase 2024 is live*! We’ll be accepting submissions from now until the end of 2024. Questions, comments, or concerns? Let us know here! Thanks everyone, and I can’t wait to see what you all have in store for us!

*Itch has been having intermittent problems today so it’s technically both live and dead until you click the link.

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Yay! Glad to see that this event has swung around again. I’ve gone ahead and dropped off two of my own games- one from January (my heart, my heart) and one from June, (My Girl). I’ve slowed down significantly on the quick turn around tiny little games, (Cuspid continues to have me in a choke hold, and life’s been busy) but happy to have something to toss into the ring, and anticipating playing all of the lovely little bite sized bits of IF this showcase’ll wrangle up. Hopefully Itch holds steady!

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Yup, I see your entries as well as several others! Fingers crossed Itch stays up, but things seem to be working for now.

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After reading the event page, I have some questions. I have a password protected page for my entry, which will need a few more refinements before it is ready.

  1. Are entrants allowed to publicly mention/discuss their participation and/or their entries during voting season?
  2. Are entrants allowed to respond to reviews of their games (positive or negative) during voting season?
  3. If a game is slated for commercial release, is it still eligible for the event? (Not relevant to me specifically, but can paywalled games or games with advertising be entered in the event?)
  4. Does the game need to remain publicly available after voting?

Apologies if these questions have already been answered elsewhere.

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Hi Vance Chance,

Thanks for the questions! These are not things that we’ve posted anywhere and I’ll need to discuss some of them with @EJoyce and get back to you. I can answer some of them now, though, so here they are as follows:

  1. Absolutely! Free discussion is allowed at any time. The only limitation is that competitors should be nice about other entries (critical reviews are OK as long as they’re polite, but rudeness or trash talking are over the line.)
  2. This is not only allowed but encouraged! Again, just be polite.
  3. All games should be free to play at least for the duration of voting. If people are advertising their participation we would prefer that the advertise the whole competition as well.
  4. This is the one I need to specifically talk to EJ about. My preference is that the game stays available forever, but there’s no real way of enforcing that.

I will say this: if someone plans on paywalling or commercially releasing a game after the SGS it will buy them a lot of community goodwill if they submit a demo version thar stays free, even if the demo is stripped down compared to the final release. (You’ll get even more goodwill points if said demo gets uploaded to the IF Archive, which we should add instructions for.)

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I thought that Dark and Deep was only a 30 minute game, but I see from the helpful new “play time” feature on IFDB that it’s coming in at more like 45 minutes average. Wah. Maybe I’ll try to finish another short one I have on the shelf and submit it.

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So happy to see this event come back around! Not been a super productive year for writing anything but play-by-post for me, but I’ve added a few of my games that didn’t get as much attention from jams earlier in the year – constellate, sojourn, and The Moon’s Knight. Excited to see everyone else’s entries!

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Following up on this question from @ChanceOfFire: since there’s no way to enforce it and the prizes are all made up, we’re not making this an official rule. In lieu of this I’ve added language to the jam page to strongly encourage people to upload their entries to the IF Archive.

I’ve also updated the jam page to add the rule about games needing to be free. I will probably continue tweaking the description to make it clear that all kinds of discussion are allowed as long as people are chill about it.

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PunyComp 2024 has a focus on short games. The last day for submission is 29 Dec, so all the participating games are published in 2024. The voting happens 30 Dec to 19 Jan though, so the final standings for PunyComp won’t be known until 20 Jan.

Would PunyComp 2024 games be eligible in the Best Previously Unawarded Game category of IF Short Games Showcase 2024?

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This is a bit of a tricky situation; I do think if a PunyComp game were to win in that category and then go on to win PunyComp, people would feel it wasn’t in the spirit of the category, but equally, most of the PunyComp games will not be winners and it feels unfair to shut them all out of it, especially since the PunyComp deadline is such that these games won’t be eligible for next year’s SGS. This being the case, we’re willing to consider them all eligible for Best Previously Unawarded Game for this year and see how it goes.

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This feels like a good solution to me. If a game won “Best Previously Unawarded” in the showcase, and then won something it was entered into afterwards then I don’t think anybody would take issue with it. The only difference here seems to be that PunyComp games won’t yet have had the chance to not win something, but that’s true of anything made in the final days of the year.

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Yup, and with other comps going on at the moment (ex: ShuffleComp) we can politely suggest the authors hold off on officially releasing their games until 2025 and submit them to next year’s Showcase instead. PunyComp entries don’t have that option due to the deadline still being in 2024. I would much rather err on the side of letting more people participate to the fullest!

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Well, the context here is that this is a new award category that we added because some people were unhappy with the number of SGS awards won by games that had already won awards elsewhere, and I would imagine it would be disappointing for those people if the “Best Previously Unawarded Game” category became a space for honoring games that were simultaneously winning awards elsewhere (but hadn’t yet when voting began).

But it’s not necessarily a given that that will happen—we had a couple cross-entries with Shufflecomp last year and how a game did in Shufflecomp vs. SGS didn’t correlate as strongly as one might expect. So my inclination is to assume that it will probably be fine, while being open to reconsidering the topic if it turns out that this year’s Best Previously etc. etc. category is dominated by the eventual winners of Punycomp and Shufflecomp.

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It’s probably posted somewhere and I just missed it, but what’s the voting period for SGS?

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According to the itch page, “Voting will run from January 1st through January 15, 2025.”

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Ah, thank you! I scrolled through the itch page before posting but managed to miss that.

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Sorry to bump this thread, but another question. If an entrant wishes to change or update their game during the voting period, are there any rules which govern that?

I just thought about this as I just made a bugfix to my entry after uploading it on itch and signing up for the event.

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Minor bug-fixes are allowed! Major changes won’t be.

No worries about bumping the thread – it’s the last day to submit, so I’m sure some people need the reminder!

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