Handing in Your Gamejam Source – What does it really mean?

Every year people running global game jams get hit with the big question.

“OMG I READ THE WEBSITE AND DO I REALLY HAVE TO GIVE OUT TEH SOURCE AND LOSE MY AWESOMIST WORK!?!”

Short answer, yes and no.  Before I play the nice guy and give you all the Cliff Notes for the whole procedure, you would do everyone a favor to be sure and read BOTH of the following pages on the GGJ site.  They explain 2 important things, the hand-in procedure for your deliverables, and details on the source license said deliverables are covered under.

Now that you opened those links in new tabs and swear to read them in detail later, I’ll give you the short and sweet version.

For Video Games you have to upload ALL your source assets – art, music, code, etc., along with a properly built executable and some press materials like screenshots, blurbs, etc.

For Board Games you have to upload a PDF that contains all the rules for your game and any necessary cutouts. (How sexy is that?) Thankfully, they don’t say you have to include cut outs of dice you need to play. I assume they assume that we’re all really nerds anyway, and at least know someone with dice they didn’t pull from a Monopoly box.

Now, the license, all works made in the GGJ are submitted under the understanding that they will be covered under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. If you don’t do lawyerese, the 25,000 question (with inflation that’s up to what now, like 125,000?) inevitably is – I just worked on this awesome game and now I’m giving it away to everyone for free? I made it don’t I own it? I could make BILLIONS in the App store!

If you really think so, then go for it! What that version of CC license means in basic terms is that the team who made the game retains all IP and creative rights to what was made.  You are distributing the game out to everyone else, for free, and giving them the ability to modify, alter and mess with it as long as they always give credit back to you and DON’T try to sell anything that derives from your work.  If YOU want to sell it, rock on, you/your team are the owners of the IP so you can do what you want…provided of course YOU haven’t used other CC licensed content in your work.  Thus we begin our trek into the legal dungeon, and that is where I will hand you the torch and wish you God Speed.

My job here is done, you know the basics and what to expect. The most important thing to remember is Rock up, have fun and make something AWESOME!

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