Great to hear!
103 total joined now! 
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Would any of you like to participate in a team? 
I was thinking about it for a while now and came to the conclusion that working together might have a lot of advantages! If you are interested in collaboration, please tell me, I will gladly form or join a team 
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We are giving away one-month Coil voucher codes to all game jam participants to help with integration and testing of Web Monetization in your game. More info here: https://itch.io/jam/the-web-monetization-challenge-2020/topic/1031845/free-one-month-coil-voucher-code-for-game-jam-participants
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Less than 4 days until the gamejam begins!
Be sure to request your Coil code in the link above. 
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Less than 19 hours as of this post before this gamejam begins!
174 people have joined! https://itch.io/jam/the-web-monetization-challenge-2020
If you are looking to collaborate and see someone offering reach out to them! If you don’t want to make a game alone this time and don’t know who to ask to join post an offer here or on itch so others can contact you.
You can’t get a free Coil code once the gamejam begins so be sure to request that now before.
If you’re reading this after the gamejam begins and are not yet convinced to put down $5 for a subscription then you can use this extension to simulate Web Monetization on localhost.
Use this extension to track payment history, as the default Coil one does not do so.
Here are some tips for new gamejammers:
- If you don’t like the picked theme don’t let that stop you from making a game. Theme is one criteria for judging. Participating and getting experience is more important than winning. Make something!
- After you get an idea, reduce the scope of it until it is extremely minimal. Only focus on turning the very core mechanics into a game. Once you have that done, then add more features around those core mechanics. You’ll naturally get more ideas to add later so add them to your idea list but don’t commit to implementing until you have the core done.
- Don’t rush trying to get a good idea that you like. A good idea can give you a ton of motivation to finish your project, while an idea you don’t love can give you the excuse to quit the gamejam (if this happens to you, pick a new idea instead). If you want your project to be more original then you’ll want to skip the most obvious ideas that the theme gives you.
- This gamejam is a full month long. You do not need to rush or crunch to finish something. But you should still try to be consistent, posting your progress publicly can help you with being accountable. You can post your progress here in this thread, in a devlog thread of your own in this forum, or on the itch forum for the gamejam, all will get you visibility. Posting in multiple places is a good idea.
- Focus on using what you know and are already productive with. Getting bogged down in new learning can distract you from your project.
- Focus on your strengths and what you are already good at doing. Partner with someone who can help compliment your skills.
- Do not disregard the opportunity to work with others. Some of the most successful gamedevs I know met the people they went on to make millions+ with during gamejams.
- Unless your role in your team is the artist, don’t spend tons of time on asset production before you have a functional core game design working. Pretty assets can help with motivation and helping a game have appeal, but don’t burn yourself out working on things that are not the core gameplay before it is function and feels fun to you.
- This gamejam has HTML5 as the primary target, which means you should be frequently testing your HTML5 builds.
- Finish what you start. Take what you begin toward a final polished game that you actually release. Even if it means cutting its features down more and more.
- If you can’t record / generate / find audio that doesn’t make ears bleed don’t include it at all, bad audio is worse than no audio at all. Collaborating with someone good at audio is a good idea if you always struggle with audio.
- This gamejam is about Web Monetization you should be thinking of ways to incorporate this into your game in ways which make sense / are creative / innovative. Besides being fun and following the theme, this is the most important thing about this jam to consider and try to incorporate. Having ads and disabling them if WM is detected should not even be the bare minimum in what you think is enough. What would Kojima do?
- If you come to the gamejam after it has already began you can still join and participate.
- Make sure you submit before the deadline. There is plenty of time, and no excuse not to submit on time.
- Join the unofficial Defold discord server to chat with others.
For those who have participated in gamejames before, what do you feel is most important?
Some generally useful tools:
- Dropbox Paper https://paper.dropbox.com/ You can use this alone or with collaborators, useful to making notes and design docs in organized fashion.
- ScreenToGif (Windows only) https://www.screentogif.com/ Make gifs/videos of your game easily. Be sure to install FFmpeg and Gifski when you install or via the Extras menu.
- Dash / Zeal for offline docs. Even if I’m online I use these for looking up features.
What general tools do you recommend that others may find useful during the gamejam? Share them!
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I managed to finally send the mail for free Coil voucher! Uff 
Don’t fogert to do this!
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I will be lenient on Defold users requesting this late though! 
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Yeah, I meant to do this the evening of the day this was announced, however, you know 
I thought I did it, but double checked it anyway today and here we are 
Wishing all the participants a suited topic, a lot of ideas, fruitful developing and bugs only that are easy to fix! 
Good luck!
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The theme for the game jam is “Secrets”. You must incorporate some aspect of the theme in your game. Perhaps some of the game mechanics are secret and has to be discovered while playing? Or there’s a secret weaved into the story, waiting to be uncovered as the game is played? Or maybe the player will find secret treasures? Or something completely different. It is all up to you!
Good luck!
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Great theme! Good luck everyone!
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Does the submission need to be open source?
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That’s not in the rules so no you do not have to make your submissions open source, but don’t let that stop you from releasing the source for your project if you want to.
About the theme… good secrets stay secret. Although I think that in the case of this gamejam a good mechanical secret would be one that would be reasonable to find in one sitting while still makes people feel clever for finding / noticing / solving / discovering. Perhaps a good idea would be to mix some reasonable to find secrets with ones that are very well hidden and only someone dedicated would find them all, though that would require catching people’s interest enough to go for and giving some clue that there are secrets out there. Then some secrets which are really well hidden and would require more experimentation than you would expect a person in one sitting to do. Sometimes secrets are too well hidden and developers have to expose the secrets themselves. That article highlights something worth striving for, that is amazing your fans. I had that sense of amazement playing some games like Dark Souls the first time through… just being amazed how big the world is, how many secret areas there were. Some of my favorite secrets ever have been in the Destiny 1 / 2 games, but those require whole communities to solve sometimes.
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No, not at all.
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I’ve sent out Coil vouchers to everyone that requested one. Let me know if you’re participating in the jam and forgot to request a voucher!
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How are your ideas going on? Anyone started already?
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Can’t say… it’s a secret…
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I posted some thoughts in my dev diary for the jam, the first idea I’m thinking about is a touch based physics puzzle game with lots of secrets. Might go with that, but still have to think about it more.
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Oh…I forgot to request a Coil Voucher. I didn’t realize that pre-application is required.
Is it possible to provide a shorter period of Coil Voucher for the late participate like me (Maybe two weeks?)
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Send me an email (bjorn@defold.se) and I’ll provide you with a code.
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I hope everyone’s secret project is going well!
Use an appmanifest to selectively disable features you know you won’t be using. Every KB counts in user experience!
https://britzl.github.io/manifestation/
Remember to publish a release bundle and not a debug bundle since debug is slower and larger. If your game is slow in HTML5 try to test it in a release bundle instead to get an idea for how it will run for real.
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