Hello and welcome! Wizard Jam is the bi-annual Idle Thumbs community-run game jam.

Wizard Jam is not a contest; the main emphasis is to celebrate the Thumbs community through sharing and collaboration over the course of a fortnight. We write devlogs and post GIFs. We offer support and volunteer music, sounds and other assets. We play each other's games and stream them. It's a lot of fun.

The other thing we try to emphasise is encouraging people to try making something new and unfamiliar; or to try game development for the first time entirely (quite a few of the entries we've had in the past are from complete first-timers to gamedev!). We run the jam over the course of two weeks to give people the room to try something weird and see how it turns out.

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Here are some details:

Wizard Jam - Friday 2nd June to Sunday 18th June

Showcase Weekend - Saturday 24th June to Sunday 25th June

Choose an episode title from any show on the Idle Thumbs podcast network and use it as a theme prompt for your game. (Thanks to Broxxar, Panzorfork & matt.ishii for providing the site)

The diversifiers are an optional challenge for the jam. They're creative prompts, designed to help you design a game around a specific limitation (or set of limitations). You can choose as many (or as few) as you like and incorporate them into your game.

"2D's company, 3D's a crowd" - Make a 3D game using only 2D graphics. 

Limited Vocabulary - Limit your player's verbs (run, jump, punch) to just one! Make a game that explores that verb to its fullest. 

"You Just Played Yourself 🔑" - Make a game where you play against yourself, or a game where your past movements or actions are important in some way. 

Hoisted - The game conspires to destroy the player in some way; or the game allows the player to be the cause of their own undoing. 

Texture Thrift - Use the same art/prop asset as many times as possible in your game, whilst obscuring the fact you are doing this. 

Frug Froctions - Include another, entirely separate game inside your game.

1. This jam is not a competition, and there is no minimum level of game development experience needed to join. People from all backgrounds are  welcome to participate. If you're new to gamedev, let us know! Join us on the forums and on Slack; where you'll find help, advice and encouragement from the community. 
2. Entries containing any form of harassment or hate-speech are not permitted. Anything crossing into this territory will be removed.

For Wizard Jam 5, we're trying something new! After the jam finishes, we'll be hosting a Showcase Weekend; an opportunity for everybody to step back from the game making process and look at what everyone else has made; with an emphasis on giving feedback and comments to fellow creators. It's covered in the schedule below, and there'll be more details to follow.

[from the Wizard Jam 5 welcome thread @ www.idlethumbs.net/forums]