The jam is all about celebrating Real-Time Strategy games. Make something cool, make something memorable. I think this genre is very small today, but I've found that there are still occasionally interesting and meaningfully compelling gameplay in this space that has lasted decades. The jam is designed to help grow the RTS community and enable more games to be created and shared.

Join our community for updates and show off your games!

RTS 98 Discord invite: https://discord.gg/T3FT67mSH6

Here's a few rules and guidelines:

• Make a game that is RTS -What is RTS?
  • Contains elements of strategy where the action happens simultaneously. (Freezing time is allowed but attacks/movement/other actions should not be done in 'turns')
  • Presentation must focus the 'strategy" element front and centered. This means FPS and TPS perspectives may count as long as the strategy aspect is emphasized. 
  • Definition of strategy: very loosely, but typically it means issuing some kind of order to your units under your command. Some sort of hierarchical system must be represented. Examples of this:
    •  A commander issuing order to infantry units.
    • You are the captain of a spaceship issuing commands to your crew to move or fire the ship.
    • You play as the leader of a wolf pack issuing orders to your subordinates to attack a target.
    • You mark pheromones on a map to order your ants to follow a certain path.

THEME ANNOUNCEMENT

In order for your game to qualify for this jam you must follow the theme:0

 🪐Science x Magic 🧙‍♂️

(or any fantasy adjacent elements like dragons, fairies, unicorns, witches etc...) 

You may earn badges for the following challenges:

•   🤼 Multiplayer - co-op, pvp whatever, do you even dare....?
•   🎒 Inventory - your characters have pockets!
•   🛸 Motherships/Mega ships/Carriers - you can start with one or build one at the ends of your tech tree
•   👾 Swarm - how many units can you simulate per frame? Go big or go home!
•   🏛 Classic - Is your game retro enough? Give me that nostalgia high!!!!
•   ⚖ Economy-Add a stock market, allow speculative trading, or just buy/sell commodities. 

Please explain with 1-2 sentence how each of these elements were incorporated*. The theme will be a requirement, but everything else is optional. Mix and match however you want. Earn cool badges, use them to gloat about how awesome your game is.  Have questions? Join discord (also includes badge art source material if you want to use them in your game) or ask them in the jam forums.

Note*: Implementing a challenge doesn't guarantee a badge. There will be a judging mechanism to determine if you satisfied a challenge requirement.

Look at these beautiful badges I made.


Optional Features

• • Although these are not required, we recommend some optional features for your game:
    • Leader boards - making some kind of RTS survival game? See how you and your friends score against each other!
    • Macros - add macros to your game, make them clear to the player. Perhaps this subtle feature may bring back that micro rush you has playing an RTS game online and learning the hot keys!
    • Multiplayer/Co-Op - While we know that there's lots of classic RTS that emphasize PvP, what about PvE? Let's see what you can make with this idea.
• General submission sensibilities
  • No spam or hate content
  • Submissions maybe submitted to other jams up to 5 times (subject to the RTS rule and spam content rule)
  • If your content is suspicious we may reach out and ask you about your submission. No response may result in being removed from the jam.
  • We may remove games we don't see fit for this jam. To ensure this doesn't happen, it is up to the developer to reach out if they have doubts if their game fits in this jam. If you feel you were unjustly removed, you may contact the organizers to try to get the game re-added. There's no lock for late submissions.
  • No AI Art or Audio. We really want to showcase human made art here. Mixing the two tends to be confusing and hard to understand what people made, what a machine made and often it just looks terrible.
• Preparations
  • This Jam is nearly 2 months long, however we expect the majority of content to be made during this time. 
  • Early engine start: RTS games are some of the most challenging, resource intensive and complicated games to design and produce. Therefor, we want to give you the best shot possible to making a polished title. Start your RTS engines early. No matter what game engines you choose (or make your own), the RTS aspect is going to take a lot of tooling and design. (Unity, Godot, Unreal, great for single character controllers, but hardly contain tools to make an RTS out of the box)
  • You may start your RTS engine at any time, think of this Jam as a 2 stage process. If you want, you can submit your game unlisted on Itch with just the bare engine and our team will playtest and provide feedback as quickly as possible to help make sure you are on the right track.
• Awards
  •  Top 100 games will receive a donation of $1. Make sure to have your donations open! This is a small monetary incentive to help you get games out there on itch. We don't have rankings this year so top 100 is subject to community opinion if there's more games that get submitted.