The Defold Foundation and Yandex.Games is hereby inviting Defold developers across the world to join a month long game jam. Developers will be challenged to create a themed web game showing their creative and developer skills as well as a good integration with the Yandex.Games SDK. The proud winner and runner-ups will receive marketing and advertisment for their submitted game, hardware, swag and bragging rights!
Learn more here: Yandex.Games Jam
For people newer to Defold, here are some useful resources worth getting familiar with before the gamejam begins.
Monarch implements the concept of screens in an easy and convenient way.
RichText allows you to easily produce special effects with your text such as having some words use unique fonts / colors, or even including emojis within your displayed text.
Using LiveUpdate features to make your HTML5 game load super fast.
Camera helpers. Both have variety of features depending on your needs.
A starter project with many non-game specific features already implemented.
If you want to make a pixel perfect 2d pixel art game study this project’s features.
There are many more useful resources depending on your needs at the Defold Asset Portal.
I’m super excited for this game jam and am currently trying to pull together a team for it. I do have a quick question:
What language should the game be released in?
I saw the github for Yandex.Games says to release the game in Russian then optionally into English / Turkish. I just wanted to confirm if we had to do that for the jam.
Thanks and good luck everyone!
Good question! Let me get back to you with an answer. My gut feeling says that we should try to submit games in Russian for the best possible results. We can provide a list of commonly used strings, such as for menu items, controller instructions and other UI elements. But if it’s a text heavy game it’s obviously harder to handle.
I would recommend that you attempt to translate your game to Russian before submitting. The PolyGlot project contains translations for many common strings used in games:
There’s also a number of native Russian speaking members in the community and hopefully you’ll be able to get help if there’s a few strings of text you need translated.
Great, thank you!
I am also very excited for the jam and would like to participate so much! I was thinking about trying Yandex for some time anyway 
Then my out-of-the-box Defold Polyglot parser could be of use here! 
Having tried a few games on Yandex, they all default to English language. Is there a way to detect which region the game is being run or should we put a language menu in somewhere as well?
Take a look:
Yandex recommends using the i18n.lang parameter to determine the user’s language. In the YaGames extension, it is:
local lang = yagames.environment().i18n.lang
print("Language is " .. lang)
Thanks, that’s helpful.
" * You are allowed to use existing tools, frameworks and libraries when creating the game."
What about assets like sounds, music and/or graphics? Can we use free and/or paid assets we own? Can we start drawing before the jam starts?
I think the spirit of the rules is that you should not already be making assets/code for a specific game meant for the gamejam. You could still make non-specific aspects of a game, such as setting up your own personal generic project template to use before the gamejam begins to get the busy work out of the way that doesn’t really have anything to do with the real gameplay.
What about assets like sounds, music and/or graphics? Can we use free and/or paid assets we own?
Personally I think you should be able to but if you do you should not be eligible for categories based on graphics/audio if those were ones. These don’t exist for this gamejam so there’s no real issue other than making sure you have the legal right to use whatever you’re planning to use.
Can we start drawing before the jam starts?
Again personal opinion: only for generic aspects that could be used for any kind of game such as making the assets for gamepad images. Making assets for a specific game idea would go against the spirit of the gamejam so you’d have to think what would and would not be game specific. We don’t know the theme yet anyway so if you did make some assets you might have to really shoehorn them in. 
Yes. We’ve updated the rules to reflect this.
No. The idea is that the game should be created during the period of the game jam. But we can obviously not know for sure that this is the case. But this is obviously a bit of a grey area. Where do we draw the line? Are you not even allowed to think about the game jam and different game ideas?
Exactly guys, this is surely a grey area, but the main concern was about generic stuff that is not vital in a creative process during the game jam period, but some simple preparations, as said buttons or so.
For jams, I like also to focus on the mechanics first and if I could use placeholders for art and sound, then it’s great!
Thank you for including this in the rules! 
Could I add any simple, example game with Yandex SDK to Yandex just for test? For example not making it public/visible or so?
Just wanted to pass the process before starting anything and see how it works 
Nevertheless, currently I’m stuck at point 2. (Получить доступ к консоли. Руководство разработчика) Edit: Ok, I used the wrong button 
(it’s in Russian, so I must translate everything, however, if anyone will stuck here - the first button is for logging and second is to create ID)
Yes, the game draft will be available by link. If you not press moderation button, moderation will not start)
Yes, and it’s a good idea. Because it takes some time (up to 24 hours) for Yandex to initialize its advertisement system for every added to the developer’s console game.
Moreover, the YaGames extension has a pre-built example .zip that you can upload instead of your game to test how SDK works. I use it to debug what SDK returns if something is not clear.
I assume that “Target” is keyword. So it might be not related to arrow, bows and etc?
