The 2024 Short Games showcase is now live! Play and rate games here, and vote for the additional awards categories here. We’ll be starting some discussion topics in the next few days, but feel free to review and discuss as you see fit!
Some notes:
The voting period has been extended an extra day because I am a ding-dong and mixed up AM and PM when setting the submission end time. Sorry about that!
A number of entries were disqualified – if you feel this was in error, please reach out to myself or @EJoyce and we’ll see what we can do.
We are also letting people with good-faith submissions that were DQ’d submit another game in its place if it fits the comp criteria. If you’d like to do this, please DM us ASAP with the link to your preferred game so that you don’t miss out on early voting!
Some games were NOT disqualified (or are allowed to be in the Best Unawarded Game category) even though they appear at first glance to not qualify.
Heartless Smoker was submitted to a fourth jam after the SGS – the rules don’t disallow this as currently written, so we’ve decided it was OK for now (but we’ll clarify the wording next year).
No More placed second in the Gothic Horror Jam #2 out of three total participants, so we’ve decided it’s not really in the spirit of things to keep it out of Best Previously Unawarded Game based on this criteria. (Again, this is something we’ll update the rules to explicitly address next year.)
If you catch anything else we’ve missed please let us know, but these two are explicitly OK.
Minutia on games that were disqualified
Two games were not published in 2024
Nine games were not interactive fiction
One game was over 30 minutes
Six games were submitted to too many jams
One game was quarantined by Itch as a suspected virus
Thanks to everyone who submitted, and let’s get playing!
By the way, we’ve created the comp page on IFDB and added listings for all the games that weren’t on IFDB, but everything still needs to be tagged “Short Games Showcase” and “Short Games Showcase 2024”, and the new listings are very bare-bones and are missing cover art, genres, release years, development systems, and so on. I’ll be working on these things over the next several days, but I would love to have some help with it if anyone feels like pitching in!
Could I please make a suggestion on an award’s category for next time? I noticed a few (as far as I can tell) unreleased games have been entered. If there’s enough of them is it worth an entry for those who appear to have been made for this comp? Might encourage some more original short games for this showcase. Just a thought though, no probs either way
That’s an interesting idea! We’ll definitely keep it in mind. Full disclosure: adding new awards categories is going to depend just as much on how much interest there is for the existing awards as anything else, so for anyone who wants to see more next year make sure to vote!
It would definitely have been smarter for me to go in alphabetical order or something, but in fact I’m being pretty haphazard about it, so picking at random is probably the way to go.
Since I think all the entrants are now listed on IFDB, and I think development systems have almost all been filled in by now, you can start with the “Search for games” link on the IFDB competition page and narrow it down by adding search terms.
