Generally speaking, game jams enforce some kind of restriction on participants, like a certain theme, time limit, game engine, game genre, or even all of the above. Upcoming visual novel jam O2A2 (Again!) is going to be a bit… different in that regard, as depicted by its full name: Only One of Any Asset. Very interesting.
With the jam lasting a full week, at least crunch isn’t going to be a big deal, even if that is mostly due to the rules/limitations. See, for this second iteration of Only One of Any Asset, you’re allowed only one of, well, (almost) anything – except words. You can put up to a thousand of those in your visual novel. Actually, why don’t I just paste the list below?
- one sprite / one character / one pose (multiple expressions without change in pose are okay)
- one background / one place / one time of day
- one thousand words
- one music track or one ambient background noise
- one sound effect
- one voice actor
- one piece of menu background art
- one project (submit only one entry where you are the creative lead/director. You may participate in other teams as a different role)
To (hopefully) avoid any confusion… here’s what is allowed/unrestricted, as well:
- themes / genres (e.g. romance, horror, comedy)
- suggestive or violent content (so long as such content is tagged appropriately on the game page)
- using Creative Commons, similarly licensed free-to-use, or paid assets
- usage of solid color backgrounds
- programming, scripting
- special effects / movement / zoom / animation (such as blinking, lipflap/mouth movement, sparkles, moving side to side, etc. Frame-by-frame animations that would change a significant portion of an image are not allowed.)
- custom GUI assets like buttons, text boxes, textures and other elements
- price point of completed entries
Adding to all that, you’d do well to stop by the website – as linked below – and read up on what is not allowed, seeing how any entry that disregards the rule will be removed. Would be a shame to spent an entire week working on something, only to be unable to participate, after all. So play nice, maybe join the DevTalk Discord if you’re feeling social and/or are in need of assistance. And last but not least, dates: July 12th, 2021 to July 19th, 2021.
Remember, there can be only one… of each.
