 Hi everybody, my name is Katie Baker and I'm here talking about the Goodell Wild Jam. It's a game jam that runs every month for about nine days and if you don't know what a game jam is, don't worry, I plan to cover it all in the talk. So a little bit about me, like I said, my name is Katie. I live in West Virginia in the USA. You've probably heard of Country Roads, that's all about West Virginia. I studied computer science in school and I worked at NASA as an outreach coordinator and then after that I worked at 4-H as a computer science innovator. But now I work for an indie game publisher as a programmer so it just makes sense that my skillset really aligned with creating this awesome community and this environment to develop, you know, open-source games. So yeah, so like I said, the Goodell Wild Jam is a game jam. It runs for nine days. You know, a group of us got together as game jambers and game jammers and participated in an event where it was basically like unity versus unreal versus Goodell. Those are pretty much, you know, like I would say some of the top game engines to use in creating games and we created a game and we won in the competition and we were like, wow, we really want to make more games in the Goodell engine but there wasn't really a space created to do that. I know that the Goodell engine community itself had, you know, tried to facilitate that kind of space but, you know, being an open-source project and dealing with the community, they had a lot on their hands. So I just decided to create it myself. I was like, well, why wait when I can just do it, you know? So game jams basically are like a fixed set of time where people get together and create games. There's usually a theme to sort of, you know, guide the design of creating games but these game jams can vary from a weekend or a week or even some of them are like a month long. Our jam is unique in the sense that we have this cool optional thing called wild cards. You can see some examples there on the bottom of my slide but wild cards are basically these optional challenges. They're supposed to either mechanically or narratively challenge people who, you know, maybe they've done a lot of game jams and they're like, yeah, this theme is okay but I'd like to do something more with it. So like one of the examples down here is have a snarky narrator in your game, you know, and they're just supposed to be really fun, engaging and just sort of, it's just supposed to be fun. It doesn't count against, you know, any score at the end of the game jam. Ours is a ranked game jam so there's always a winner at the end but some of them are unranked, some of them have prizes, some of them have trophies. It really just varies by game jam and, you know, the creator and the organizer of that community. So the way that we function, we primarily house our community in a Discord server. You can join that by going to discord.gg slash gado wild jam or you can get our website gadowildjam.com and find all of the, you know, social media links and learn more about us. So but the Discord server has essentially two channels. One is a theme vote and one is a wildcard vote because we as organizers do not pick what the theme and the wildcards are. We let the community do that. We think it's so much better when it organically bubbles up and actually recently our 42nd jam is going on as I speak. We're like in the middle of it right now. And one of our community members, his name is John Gabriel, he actually created a Discord bot that manages all the votes and the wildcard votes for every jam. And he spent, he spent his own personal time and, you know, made this awesome contribution to our community. And that's how a lot of things happen in our community actually. Like I have the idea for wildcards but then someone else in the community designed them, you know, like people just step up and really volunteer and take that initiative. And it's just, it's really wholesome. It's very cozy. We take a lot of pride in being like friendly and respectful, you know, like if you're a beginner or a veteran, you've never done a game jam. If you have no idea what you're doing or, you know, maybe you've been a professional software engineer for like two decades and you're like, Hey, I just want to try this out. Like, no matter your skill level or like experience level, you know, we are, we're, we're, we welcome everybody. So it's been pretty cool. So yeah, that's a little bit about like how our process works is so we have the community choose these two things. It's usually about three to four days before the jam starts. And then, you know, like our internal administrative team will be like, you know, what do we think is going to be a good fit for the theme? Like right now the theme for this jam is ancient, which some people like, some people don't like, you know, it's you're never going to make everybody happy. I'm sure anyone who's done community management can speak to that. But yeah, we really try to listen to our community and take the feedback that they give us. And everyone who submits a game, we really encourage them to make the code to their game open source and available. It's actually one of the questions in our submission form when they submit their game. Because we use, we use a platform called itch.io. And it's, it's pretty much the primary platform for like hosting game jams and submitting games. I'm sure some of you have heard of it. But yeah, in our submission form, we really try to encourage folks to, you know, make their games open source. But also alongside that, we really try to encourage people who really feel like taking the risk to use the latest version of the Godot engine, because we know that, you know, finding those bugs, testing out new features and giving, you know, giving feedback on the GitHub page is like crucial to the, to the development of the engine. So we really, you know, we try to be like, Hey, come please be a beta tester for the Godot engine, but also, you know, make a game you're interested in. It's very like, you know, it's twofold. So so like I said, we do have a winner for each of our jams. And we call these, we call them wildlings, which just was kind of like a happy accident on the name. But here's a little screenshot of some of the recent winners and the games that were made. Again, you can find these on itch.io. You know, some developers have chosen to make those games private after the jam, which is, you know, completely their right, like, we don't own the game, or any of their content after the fact. We do let them know that, you know, we might use it in talks like this or sort of promotional things, but outside of that, you know, the source code and everything else is completely theirs. But yeah, we like to say in our community that anyone who submits a game is basically a winner in our book, because, you know, the commitment and follow through to really finish a game. It takes a lot of, you know, mental energy. And, you know, you have to block out time, you have to think about, you know, creating game assets and music, and, you know, designing the game, like what are the mechanics going to be? How are people going to win? Is it going to make sense? Do I need to include a tutorial? Like there's it's so complicated. And so for people to even finish, you know, an MVP of something or even just like a prototype, we think that's a huge success. And we've actually created over about, I want to say, 1700 games have been created using the Godot engine, which is just pretty cool, pretty exciting. Like after our first, you know, Godot Wild Jam back in September 2018, we only had 170 people in our discord. Now we're approaching 5000 members and starting our fourth year. So it's pretty, pretty wild, pun intended. And we've, we've been jamming for over 600 days. And we've had 41 winners. And, you know, our jam has become so popular that we're even inspiring other jams to sort of like mimic our format. So the picture on the right here in my slide is from the narrative jam. And they even say on their page, you know, these are like the Godot Wild Jam wildcards. And they even made little cute graphics. And even though they don't use them in the same capacity, just like the concept and idea for that is, you know, it's really cool. And also, we really want to normalize the idea that, you know, jams really should be accommodating. It's a low stakes, low entry kind of event. And, you know, sure, you can do it in a weekend if you really feel like it. But you know, what about for the people who, you know, have families have schools who are working, you know, maybe a job or two and still have an interest in being part of this community. So we really strive to normalize the idea of like having a jam that's longer than a week. We've really low stakes, low pressure, like, you know, we constantly remind our members to, you know, hydrate, stretch, take that break, go for that walk, do what you need to do. You know, the game jam will still be here when you come back. And that's another thing about it being so cool that it's every month, you know, maybe this month, I'm too busy. Maybe this month, I just don't feel like it, but that's okay, because there's always another opportunity for it the very next month. So there's no, there's no expectation or requirement, you know, like it's, it's come as you will when you want. So and last but not least, it's just a great big thank you to the Godot engine, because without the Godot engine, we literally cannot exist. And, you know, when we first launched the Godot engine people, their, their community reached out and was like, hey, you know, we'll give you some visibility, we'll help promote you, we'll spread the word. And ever since then, they've just been really supportive and encouraging, you know, and we've collaborated on different things and like, you know, talked about our two communities a lot. And they've just been awesome. So we take a lot of pride in, you know, spreading how great of a community and game engine that Godot is. So and with that, I will go ahead and take any questions you guys have in chat. Thank you very much, Kathy, even for the quicker switching in the agenda. Yeah. Are there any questions from the chat or the people in the big blue button? Okay, I see Michael's comment in there about, yeah, using Discord and it is, it is unfortunate. We have looked into alternatives as far as free software perspective goes. We've talked about using matrix or, you know, even using like IRC or something like that. So it is in the back of our mind, but we just don't have any definitive plans on that. And Sebastian, thank you for the answer. Question has a question. Do you find that most submissions are created with the graphical Godot engine editor? Or do people tend to fare favorite traditional tools like get and text? Sebastian, I'm not sure I understand your question. So every game is required to use the Godot engine. They asked you find that most submissions are created with the graphical Godot engine editor. Do people tend to favor traditional tools like get and text editors? I mean, I would say participants use a mix of both. I mean, Okay, we wait for Sebastian to rephrase it and Nina has already asked my question. I wanted to know what's your favorite. I have a favorite game that was developed in a Godot wild jam. Oh man, that is a really difficult question. Oh, I don't know that I could pick one. I, I love so many of them. I actually, I'm trying to set up a stream where I play through all entries in the jam. But scheduling that is pretty cumbersome. But because, you know, sometimes I get to play all the entries and sometimes I don't because usually we have anywhere between 60 to 90 entries a month as far as games go. I just, I do not have the time as one person. My gosh, that's quite a lot. I can imagine. I do have a question for the game terms as well. Are there any game terms hosted in another language than English? Have you hear me? Okay. I'm, I, I'm not quite sure. Can anybody give me feedback? And Max has also question. Max asked, can you tell how many games developed during these jams are continued to be developed and dropped afterwards? I would say that a large chunk are dropped off afterwards, but we've had probably I would say like, anywhere from a dozen to 20 that have continued development and have even some of them been released on Steam. Okay, I will try it again if you can hear me now. And just to add to what you said, Max, we do have a channel in our server for updated jam games. So we do try to encourage folks to continue working on them. And some of them do and some of them do not. It's just it's very touch and go. I cannot hear Bonnie. Okay, everybody else can. Oh, okay. That's going very well today. Um, my best. Now I can hear Bonnie. I'm so sorry. Was I speaking over you, Bonnie? I'm so sorry. No worries. Yeah, I just, I was reading the questions that I was like, oh, maybe I should repeat these for the recording. Clearly no, I was like, I was also reading them, I think. Oh, my gosh, this is one of my favorite podcasts. This is such a great one. Okay, I was wondering if there are any game terms in another language hosted then in English? There is not. The primary language that we do use in our community is English, just because we don't have anyone on our administrative team that can moderate or manage, you know, oversee like another language because as someone who who primarily speaks English, you know, if someone said something in another language in the server, that was perhaps inappropriate. I just I wouldn't I wouldn't be able to address that. So we are primarily in English speaking community. All right, thank you very much. I would say this is the last question and then we will try it with Joel again. Yeah, there are some in the chat there. Yeah, I can whatever is not answered. Yeah, you like best. I'll answer I'll address Sebastian and well, Sebastian, I would say it's pretty much visuals or I mean, they use the graphical interface. I don't know that too many people actually compile or use the C++ side. Also, as it's prone, I know it's more bug ridden than like the GD script. And do you know if the games that continue to be developed by how many are free software, I would say a large chunk of them are free software because our community is very supportive of free software and actually a lot of the tools that we and resources that we provide to game jammers are, you know, free software. So if you have any free software game development tools, please link some to me in chat because I'd love to share them with our community.