The Crunchless Challenge is an open event where you are invited to join the challenge to make a proper game sustainably, without crunching. In February 2021 I've decided to make a game in a 35 hours work week during what I called the "One Week Crunchless Challenge" and it was so interesting and instructive that I decided to hold a new one! This time around, It's open to all and we'll be able to take as much time as we want during a full month, but there's a catch, we have to decide how much time beforehand and stick to it!
If you ever took part of a game jam before, this is totally different:
- No competition
- No rating
- No ranking
- No required theme announced at the start
- Not required to create everything from scratch during the challenge duration
- No feeling bad because you decided to go outside, eat and sleep!
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You choose your own sustainable time schedule:
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Making a good game-play loop is only one side of the challenge, you must also plan: - Polish, Reliability and Accessibility
- Branding / Visual Identity
- Communication / Marketing
- Time management / Scope
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You are expected to actually put up your game for sale at a sustainable price at the end of the challenge.
- You can work alone or as a team (You can use the community tab to look for a team)
At the end of the challenge, if you end up making something you are proud to call "the game I/we made" and proud to put it up for sale, by managing your time in a way that respects what you planned at the beginning, without having to crunch, then you succeed.
You are highly encouraged to:
- Use Free/Libre and Open Source tools to make your game. By using, contributing and supporting FLOS tools, more and more of the tooling we need to actually start making games are being shared and worked on by everyone instead of being something all teams have to either make themselves or become dependent on other companies to get.
- Do not sell your game for less that you think it should be. By trying to get a slice of the pie at all costs, some game industry practices made the users massively undervalue what games should be worth. If we don't want to be forced to get money by crunching to make more half-baked games, or by psychologically manipulating users into spending money for in-game currencies, or by selling their attention span through ads, we have to act now and we have to act as a group, by all selling our games at proper prices.
- Document your process. Make regular posts, stream your work sessions or shoot videos, following your journey, showing you planning and sticking to your plans, or having to change the plans and why.
- Make a Postmortem post and declare if you succeeded the challenge or not and why.
- Reuse, recycle! Take that old project or idea that you've been putting off and work on that.
- Have Fun!