Register Now for Mystery Game Jam 2025!
A brief overview of game jams and why you should join this one
Happy Mystery Monday!
Today’s post will talk about game jams, specifically this year’s Mystery Game Jam!
The event will start April 4th, but we wanted to get the registration page up with plenty of time to spare. You can go ahead and register for the event here, or keep reading to learn more about it.
What is a Game Jam?
Game jams are events where participants must create a game within a time limit. Some well-known game jams include Ludum Dare, Brackeys Game Jam, and GMTK Game Jam.
Usually it is not just about making any game, but a specific kind of game — whether it’s based on genre, the tools used to make the game, or a theme that all participants need to follow. Most game jams are just for the fun of it, and can be enjoyed by hobbyists, but some jams are competitive with rankings and prizes.
Some game jams like Ludum Dare are very short, only lasting for 1 to 3 days. Other jams may go up to one week or even one month or possibly longer. As a result, most game jam games are not usually completely finalized as games, but represent a prototype or demo from which to expand into a full game later on. Many successful games once started out as game jam entries, including The Darkside Detective, INSCRYPTION, and Forager.
What is the Mystery Game Jam?
The Mystery Game Jam is our attempt at encouraging people to dedicate at least part of the year to making a mystery game. Despite the popularity of mysteries in books, TV, podcasts, and so on — less than one percent of all games on the Itch.io website ate tagged as mystery games. This is a very small percentage when a genre like “platformer” makes up roughly 14.5% of all games on that same website. Even the popular “horror” genre is roughly 5% of all games there, too.
And as a life-long fan of mystery games myself, the search to find the next mystery game I want to play has always been like searching for a needle in a haystack. It doesn’t help that so many mystery games go unfinished. It is understandable though, because I know mystery games aren’t the easiest kind of game to make, which I’m sure makes the abandonment rate a lot higher than other genres.
But that’s also our long-term goal at Mystery Gamedev: to help developers make great mystery games, and to help players discover them.
So our goal is to hold a game jam, at least once per year, to encourage the creation of more mystery games.
As mentioned earlier, the registration page is now live. I did this because we managed to gain a surprisingly large amount of people just from having the page up one month before it began, and I suspect that if I have the page up even earlier, we could keep that momentum going and gain even more people this time around.
So if you are interested, don’t hesitate to register! It is 100% free, and you have no obligation to actually submit anything (but please don’t ghost your team).
Differences From Last Year’s Event
You can read the exact rules on the jam page, so I wanted to use today’s post to clarify a few other points not mentioned there.
The 2024 Mystery Game Jam was the first time I ever ran a game jam event. It was a generally successful event with over 150 participants and 24 final entries. That said, I still had a lot to learn. So just like our yearly feedback survey, I asked the participants in the game jam to fill out their own survey to improve the next Mystery Game Jam.
We will be doing the team-building process a bit differently this year. More details on that closer to the time of the event, but if you are registered, then you will be alerted when the time comes.
There was a surprising amount of confusion last year about what assets people were allowed to use or not use. For the sake of simplicity, the rule has been shortened to its core idea:
You may use pre-existing assets and code to speed up development, as long as you have the legal right to use them.
One major change from last year is that — yes, because we are going to take this sentence at face-value — it means that you can use assets or code you’ve made for previous games prior to the jam.
At least, as long as you really do have the legal right to use them outside of their original game. I can imagine a scenario where you commissioned or purchased assets for a specific game, and maybe you don’t have the full legal right to use the asset in a different game, or some unique situation like that. I don’t know how often that kind of thing actually happens. But that responsibility will fall on you, and we’ll remove any submissions where this kind of issue becomes clear.
Last year, more than half of the submitted games were unfinished demos, and many of those were only a few minutes long. This indicated to me that we need more tools to help kickstart development so you can actually focus on making content over spending all your time setting up the basic stuff. Allowing people to repurpose assets and code they’ve already made should help get most people past that hurdle, allowing them to spend most of the jam working on the fun part.
Someone can correct me if I’m wrong, but I think this is more common in modern game jams than I first realized. Enforcing an artificial rule where you can’t use your previous work is also not accurate to real-world development, where it’s usually the exact opposite — the best developers will purposefully re-use old parts to make new things more quickly. That kind of rule also has some strange side-effects where, for example, if you’ve made a tool for yourself in the past, you can’t use it here — but if you released that tool to the public, then anyone other than you could. That logic just doesn’t make any sense to me.
Ultimately, I want to see fun games created fast, and the rules need to reflect that goal.
You might argue that it’s not fair and people can cheat by creating assets and code before the jam starts — but not if we require a theme that nobody knows about until the day of the event. Your game will still need to adhere to this theme, and any work that goes into creating pre-made content could actually become wasted effort if it doesn’t align with the theme. So I think this is worth giving a try.
It also seemed like many people had analysis paralysis — they didn’t know what to work on since “mystery” was such an all-encompassing term. By including a theme (which many people in the survey also wanted) we can narrow down the range of creative choices into a reasonably small (yet still fulfilling) amount.
Many people also wanted voting. I think it was disappointing for some people to have spent an entire month working on the game only to receive very little attention or feedback on it. Voting at least opens up the opportunity for others to take a look and comment on the game.
The voting criteria are as follows:
Jam Theme
Logical Consistency
Puzzle Fairness
Immersive Atmosphere
Emotional Depth
Innovative Gameplay
Satisfying Answers
General Enjoyment
As far as prizes go, unfortunately I just don’t have much to offer right now, due to external life circumstances. So there is nothing particularly high-stakes up for grabs, other than being named the winner. But next year I think I’ll be able to offer a lot more. At the very least, this should (whether intentionally or not) deter people who just want to make a game for the sake of winning a prize.
Future Potential Mystery Game Jams
At the same time, I know that others just want to make a mystery game in a relaxed environment without scrutiny, criticism, or judgement. There is nothing stopping us from holding more than one kind of mystery game jam, so maybe in the future we can have one that is competitive and one that is more relaxed. Since we did a relaxed one last year, I want to give a competitive version a try.
I also know that some people requested the ability to submit games that are already in-progress, such as updating a game from last year’s event. As much as I am sympathetic to this idea, I just couldn’t make it work for the April jam. Some game jams are designed around updating old games, but most of them are not. So I would like to keep this particular jam focused on encouraging the creation of new games.
However, I want to say this much: I like the idea of having a jam dedicated to updating unfinished mystery games (for the reason I mentioned earlier — so many of them do go unfinished). So I’d actually like to run a separate game jam just for that purpose. We are already doing this jam in the Spring (April/May, just like the character from Ace Attorney) and I actually have secret plans for other big events in the Summer and Fall, so by process of elimination that means Winter would be the best time for that kind of game jam.
Of course, we’re in the Winter months right now, so I already kinda messed up on that (because that event could be going on right now). But there’s nothing we can really do about it at this point, and just plan on it for next year. I would probably set that event to run from January to February, since I wouldn’t want it to interfere with the holidays. But I am definitely in favor of making it happen next time.
Conclusion
This should cover everything relevant without getting too long-winded. Again, the rules themselves are on the registration page, and if you ever have any questions, suggestions, or anything else, you can comment here or message us on Discord.
I appreciate everyone’s continued interest in these events. Please share the registration link to anyone you know who’s been wanting to make a mystery game, because it’s the perfect opportunity to get started. Really looking forward to seeing what new games everyone will make this year!
Thanks for reading!
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