Mr PartyHard, with all due respect, everything is subjective and I am curious what not on theme would look like yo you, given that the theme is purposely vague and open ended.
Yours Sincerely, Garry Newman.
Fair enough, Mr. Newman.
For me, an entry starts to feel off-theme when “One More Round” could be removed entirely without changing the game’s core mechanics, structure, or concept in any meaningful way.
I agree that the theme is intentionally vague and open-ended — that is part of the fun. But I would still expect it to influence the design somehow: gameplay loop, progression, narrative, rules, or a central mechanic.
If the connection is only “the game has rounds”, “you can play another run”, or the word “round” appears somewhere in the title, then the theme becomes so broad that almost any game ever made could qualify. At that point, the theme starts doing very little actual work.
There is also a practical problem with that. If an entry does not visibly depend on the theme in any meaningful way, and the theme itself can be retrofitted onto almost any existing game, then from the outside there is very little distinction between a game genuinely designed around the jam theme and a game that may have already been in development long before the jam started and was simply adapted to fit it afterwards. I’m not accusing any particular entry of doing that — only saying that a stronger thematic requirement would make that distinction much clearer.
That is mainly what I meant. I would still rather not start naming individual entries, because I think this is more useful as a discussion about judging criteria than as a public list of games people think should be disqualified.
Yours subjectively,
PartyHard
