- Participants must be 18 years or older to enter and have a trust level of at least 1. If you have questions on how to get TL1 see our post on discourse trust levels.
- Teams of any size may also submit a game, but all members must be over the age of 18 and their names listed on the submission topic.
- The submitted game must abide with Weight Gaming’s Terms of Service and US law.
- Weight Gaming staff may participate in Gain Jams, but due to conflict of interest & knowledge of the theme before the Gain Jam starts they will not be eligible to receive any rewards or prizes.
- All entries must be new games and produced within the specified two-week period. Keep in mind this rule does not forbid the reuse of assets or code; we just dont want people doing simple reskins of an existing game.
- All entries must make use of the specified theme.
- While we do not expect a production-grade game, the game should be stable enough that it can be played with only intermittent crashes at worst.
Due to previous incidents, we will look to preserving the identities and maintaining the anonymity of any and all individuals who assist in the Gain Jam within the capacity as a Volunteer Judge. Any individual will reserve the right to publicly disclose their position if they so choose.
An appointed Lead Judge (Alex Kay for this year's Gain Jam) will, among their duties, serve as the public representative of the Judges and of the judging process as a whole. Any announcements to publicly inform about the judging process will be raised by the Lead Judge and any enquiries related to the Gain Jam can be directed to the Lead Judge.
The contacting of any publicly-known Volunteer Judges or non-Gain Jam staff directly with questions or other topics related to the Gain Jam will be strictly prohibited unless otherwise specified. In addition to the Lead Judge, any enquiries and related issues should be posted to any of the following alternatives:
- The Questions, Help, & Info Gain Jam forum board
- The relevant channels in our Discord server
- Directed to Community Manager Alex Kay either via Discord or Weight Gaming.
Any harassment of Judges or Staff is strictly prohibited under all circumstances.
Reported violations of the above will result in one warning before being followed by a Disqualification if violations continue. If needs be, we do reserve the right to move for immediate Disqualification without warning or escalate with further administrative action depending on the severity of the violation.
- Extensions to the Jam will only be given under extenuating circumstances in which an external factor that is not under a participant's control impedes their ability to submit before the deadline.
- The issue in question must be proven to be either significantly unfair to a minority of the participants or effects all participants equally.
- Any extension will be up to a maximum of 24 hours unless extenuating circumstances outside of the control of Weight Gaming require a longer extension.
- Only one entry allowed per team/user.
- NOTE: A single user can be apart of multiple teams but this is discouraged
- All entries must be public and free to play to be eligible.
- All entries must be submitted within the specified two-week timeframe. Any entries submitted before or after that period will not be eligible to win.
- All entries must be submitted as a standalone game. We should not need access to the engine the game was built on to run it and mods are not accepted entries.
- To submit a game create a new topic within the appropriate subcategory in the Gain Jam Category category with a link to or an attachment of your game.
- Do not create any topics other than submissions in the Gain Jam Category. Any non-submission related topics will be deleted immediately.
- Do not modify your submission after the jam closes. If your game is hosted on a third-party site like itch.io or is browser-based, do not update it till after judging has closed. Submissions we find or suspect have been modified after the jam closes for judging will be disqualified.
- If a cash prize is offered, participants must have a valid Paypal account to receive the cash prize.
- If the winning game was made by a team, they must designate a rep that will receive the prize money and divide it among the team members.
- This can be done by sending a Weight Gaming staff member a screenshot of all team members acknowledging the rep designation or by conducting a group chat with a Weight Gaming staff member present.
- There will be a 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place Overall Winner based off of two rounds of judging deliberations.
- In the event the 1st place winner can not or will not accept the cash prize, the reward will be split between the 2nd & 3rd place entries.
- In the event 2nd and/or 3rd place can not or will not accept the cash prize their respective portion of the winnings will be returned to Weight Gaming.
- Along with the Overall Winners there are four additional "Best Of" categories, each with a cash prize:
- Best Art
- Best Writing
- Best Sound Design
- Community Choice
- There will be only one winner per "Best Of" category with no 2nd or 3rd place positions.
- To help spread out the prizes, Overall Winners are precluded from also winning a "Best Of" category.
- This is also due to the fact the highest ranked games will also likely be scoring highly in at least one of the categories as well.
- Community Choice is the only category award that is exempt from this rule.
- In the event the winner of a "Best Of" category can not or will not accept the cash prize, their respective portion of the winnings will be returned to Weight Gaming.
- Every Gain Jam will have one Community Choice winner.
- The winner of the Community Choice Award is determined by the number of likes their submission receives.
- Voting will continue for one week after the closing date of the Gain Jam.
- All members may vote by liking submissions and can vote for as many submissions as they like.
- In the event of a tie, the Gain Jam Lead Judge will break the tie.