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Follow junaliceart on Game Jolt at https://gamejolt.com/invite/junaliceart

THE BATTLE OF BOK.

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Follow Erbmaster on Game Jolt at https://gamejolt.com/invite/Erbmaster!

Hammer time!

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Follow Erbmaster on Game Jolt at https://gamejolt.com/invite/Erbmaster ⚡

Hey everyone, I'm a Game Jolt Creator now! If you've never heard of Game Jolt before, many years ago it started as a website for indie game developers and fans. Recently they've added many features that made it more friendly towards artists, musicians, streamers and fan culture. Their most recent addition is the Game Jolt Creator Program which allows people who frequent the site to support creators with some of Game Jolt's revenue through the use of charged stickers. Charged stickers are free, easy to obtain, and they can be slapped onto any Game Jolt Creator's post. I've been on Game Jolt for about 13 years and it's a pretty wild place with a lot of potential... If you're interested you should check it out! If any fellow artists decide to try it out, let me know and I'll shout you out to give you a visibility boost! Currently the Game Jolt Creator Program is in private Beta but you can apply to join through here: https://gamejolt.com/creators

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Follow KimberlyPereyra on Game Jolt at https://gamejolt.com/invite/KimberlyPereyra ❤️

Cala María from Cuphead (ΦωΦ) it took me a long time but I did it (๑•̀ㅂ•́)و✧ #cuphead #cupheadfanart #calamaria #calamariacuphead #mugman #mugmanfanart #cupheadshow #cupheadshowfanart #cupheadgame #cupheaddealwiththedevil #fanart #digitalart #procreate #procreateart #artistoninstagram #gamejolt https://www.instagram.com/p/CoKkMWwumh1/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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Indies VS Gamers - A game jam by PewDiePie, Markiplier, Jacksepticeye, and Game Jolt

Developers will have 72 hrs to make a game implementing scoreboards. 

Gamers will vote on the best games.

Everyone will compete in the winning games to get the best scores to dominate the scoreboards!

PewDiePie, Markiplier, and Jacksepticeye will make videos of all the winning games, as well as compete for scores along with us all.

Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah. Gonna be so much fun!

http://jams.gamejolt.io/indiesvsgamers

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#GameJoltNext: Open Beta

Want a taste of what we've been brewin'? Game Jolt Next is ready for you to try out!

Welcome to the future.

A little birdie may have told you that the folks at Game Jolt have been brewing something really, really, really big for the last few months. It has come time for… the Great Gas Release.

Okay, okay, that may have been an April Fool’s joke, but it contained nuggets of truth. We really have been cooking up something awesome and we’re ready for you to taste it.

If you follow us on Twitter, you may have have seen a few tweets with the#GameJoltNext hashtag, and you might have wondered where we’re at with it. Our road to the future has been fraught with peril—giant orcs blocking our path, evil aliens trying to control our minds, and even a creepy animatronic bear stalking us in the night.

We at Game Jolt have been working hard to get this new site to the point that it can be used and enjoyed by all of you. We wouldn’t have been able to do it without all of our amazing testers (thank you we love you!) who continue to submit bug reports. Well, now you can too!

The point of making the new site was to create a better framework for the future. We’ve had a lot of plans, but have been limited by the current site—it was made in 2008! Now, we’ve built a strong foundation for Game Jolt that will take us into infinity and beyond the next 7 years.

But, what does the future behold?

A lot. Let me tell you about it. If you want to skip right away to trying out the new site, you can access it at:

http://wttf.gamejolt.com

Mobile

So I heard you like small computers.

Well, fret not, because now every single freakin’ page on the site works on your mobile device, whether an itsy bitsy phone screen, a middling tablet screen, or one of those huge 40 inch mobile screens the future is rumored to have…yeah.

You can now browse games, follow ‘em, add ‘em to playlists, keep up to date on the latest news for games you’re following, chat with other members, etc. all from the comfort of your toilet.

Better Browsing

Game Jolt is an open system, allowing anyone to post a game. It always has been. One of our goals is to make it easier to find the games you like, to somehow sift through the massive amount of games to locate those you might be interested in.

To accomplish this, we’ve added some new ways to view games. You can browse through different views, like the week’s best games, the all-time best games, and our daily featured games. We’ve added Hot Games, Hotness being a rough measure of community interest in a specific game. And of course there’s still the classic Newly Added section if your middle name just happens to be Intrepid.

There’s also a new Featured Tags area that will be the host to themed views. For those interested in finding games within a specific theme, this will be your go-to.

Filtering

We’ve noticed that many people didn’t realize you could filter games while browsing Game Jolt. Our solution is to make it more visible, and with more options, allowing you to quickly filter what you’d like to see. Tired of seeing unfinished games? Just toggle to view Complete games only. Filter by operating system, type of browser game, or maturity rating. You can even filter by text input!

Pro tip: Include phrases by putting them in quotes " and exclude words with a minus sign -.

Playlists

Finally, you can organize the games in your library! Playlists are a cool new way to organize, curate, and share collections of games. You can share your playlists and follow other people’s playlists, which are then added to your library and updated when new games are put in it.

Playlists take care of another big request that we’ve been hearing from you for a long time: a way to follow developers. Now, you can add all of a developer’s games to your library in a playlist that will be updated whenever that dev releases a new game.

Playing Games

First of all, browser games no longer launch as soon as you open the page. Even better, when you click to play one, it will be pulled to the forefront in its own modal window, so you can play it without distraction.

But what if you need to view the description to find out the controls, or you want to rate the game and go back to playing without refreshing the page, or a friend of yours sends you a chat message? What to do!? Well, now you can minimize the game, do your business, even browse other pages on site, and still bring it back up to play.

News

For a while now, the news feed has just been a list of the latest news on the homepage. No way to see older news, no way to filter news, nuthin’.

We’ve changed this up quite a bit! Similar to how games are presented, we’ve added a Hot sort for news. This takes into account details such as follower count to show you the Hottest news. Want to see all the news instead, or just news from the games you’re following? Now you can do that, too. So start following more games!

Activity Feed

Notifications have gotten a total overhaul. Mercifully, you can now dismiss all notifications with a single click. But what if you get a news update you wanted to read and accidentally dismissed it? How will you ever find it again!?

Well, now there’s an activity feed where you can find any notification you have ever received. You can filter them and page through them with ease. This should help you stay up to date with the news and activity that interests you most.

Search

Let’s face it, search is just terrible on the current site (hangs head in shame). Well, that’s changed! We now attempt to be so good with search results that we show an autocomplete dropdown as you type. Our goal is to get the results you’re looking for within the top 5 suggestions. Also your search history is stored to make common searches quicker.

Pro tip! You can press the s key to quickly focus the search box and type right away so you never have to use the mouse. Huzzah!

And of course many more things…

Use Markdown in comments to format text, add links, etc.

See what platforms a game runs on in the game listings, before you click into it.

Become a master of keyboard shortcuts to navigate the site faster. Pressshift+? to view them all.

Oh, and you can finally unlink your social media accounts on your own. Uhhh, yeah.

And more, and more, and more…

More to come…

There are a few things that aren’t quite implemented, like forums and developer dashboards. If you’re a developer, you can’t manage games through the new site yet—you’ll have to do that on the old site for now. But wait until you see how much better we’ve made uploading and managing games!

What if I find a bug?

Tell us! But first, see if it’s already been reported on the Game Jolt Next issue tracker. If it’s not there, please add it by creating a new issue. Hold off on requesting new features while we focus on finishing our current to-do list.

So how do I get to the future?

Just point your browser to:

http://wttf.gamejolt.com/

The new site will live there for a while. And don’t worry, if change is hard for you, you can still access the old site at the usual URL (for now).

Thanks for test driving Game Jolt Next! We hope you like it.

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Game Jolt Jams: Awards Update

Now you can create unique awards to be given out after your jam!

It’s been a while since we've made any public announcements about Game Jolt Jams, despite a bunch of improvements having been implemented since its public unveiling.

Thanks to you, the jam organizers, participants, and voters, Game Jolt Jams has been more widely-used than we ever expected (okay, maybe we expected it a little). Your feedback and input has helped us to hone elements of the system and add new features like the latest… Awards!

So what can you do with Awards? Let’s look at a few possible scenarios:

Maybe you want the community to rate games, but you also want to have a panel of judges pick their favorites and issue special awards.

Perhaps you want participants to rate each other’s games, and you want a jury to hand out some wacky superlatives, as well.

Or maybe you want to turn off community voting entirely and just give out some awards yourself.

Now you can handle all of that, and any permutations thereof, easy squeezy. Also lemon peasey.

It works pretty simply. You just create awards before, during, or even after the jam, then you choose what game or games win each of them. You can name your awards, give them descriptions, and decide the order in which they’ll appear after the jam. You can even decide the order of games within each award, should multiple games win the same one.

Assign your awards before the voting period ends, and they’ll be displayed in the list of entries and on each game’s jam page automatically at the close of voting, along with any ranked results from community voting (if applicable).

So, have fun coming up with some cool awards for your jams! There are some classics you could use, like Grand Prize, 1st Place, Best Audio, Judges’ Choice, and so on. Or you could create some that are tailored to the theme of your jam. You can be serious or silly with Awards. Let your imagination run wild!

As always, we will treasure any feedback we get about the Awards feature, or about any other aspect of Game Jolt Jams. We are devoting most of our resources to #GameJoltNext now, but we will always continue to tweak and polish Jams, and for that we need your help.

THANK YOU!

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#GameJoltNext: News Feeds

We're serving up game news in a more relevant and customized way on the new site.

It's never a slow news day on Game Jolt. So much game news is posted every day that it can be hard to keep up with the announcements that might interest you the most.

On the current site, there's a news feed on the homepage and that's the only place. As news updates are posted, new ones push the old ones off the bottom of the page. There's no way to sort news and there's no way to browse older news.

So we decided to fix that.

On the new site, the homepage will show only 3 news updates, along with a tab to switch to your followed games instead. This way, you can see what's most important to you. But that's just the homepage. Now, you'll have easy access to all the rest of the news in a sortable, paginated feed.

On the news feed page,  you can use tabs to view all the latest news, news from just games you follow, news about games that are still in development, or news from games that have already been released. We can tweak or add to those categories in the future.

On the homepage and in each category of your news feed, we now sort articles by a new ranking called "Hot". It uses games' follower counts to figure out the "weight" of each news post. It still sorts by newly added, but adds in that extra weighting, similar to reddit's hot algorithm.

This system still allows games without many (or any) followers to get on the first page of the news feed, but it moves them down the list faster than games with more followers. Unless, of course, they nab a bunch of followers with the amazing news they just posted!

Hot allows more popular and more validated games to stay near the top of feeds for a longer period of time while also giving new games a chance to be recognized. And, if you want, you can always switch back to sorting by New instead of Hot.

Catching up on old news is a breeze now, too. You can browse pages of older news, sorted however you like.

There will be continuing tweaks to the news system, but it seems like a much more solid base than before. We'll see how it fares when we launch the new site, and then we can make tweaks based on the usage data we gather.

We're getting closer and closer to releasing #GameJoltNext. Most of the major work is being wrapped up, and we're getting loads of great feedback from our testers. We can't wait to show you more!

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#GameJoltNext: Now Open to First Wave Testers

Thank you, Game Jolt community. We were absolutely blown away by the response our call for #GameJoltNext testers generated.

And now, the news you’ve been waiting for: An early build of #GameJoltNext has been opened up to the first round of testers. If you were selected for this first wave of testing, you have already received an email from us.

Note that some elements like user and developer dashboards are not in place yet; this build is for testers to have a go at basic browsing and navigation of the site from a gamer’s perspective.

What If I Didn't Get Selected?

Don’t worry! If you didn’t get selected this time, it doesn’t mean you won’t be able to be a tester. This is just the first wave and we’ll be opening up testing to more and more people as time goes by.

In the meantime, you can follow along with the Issue Tracker to stay informed about what kinks are being worked out and what’s planned for the future.

Also, keep an eye on blogs and social media, etc. If you want another peek at the site, maybe you can convince some testers to throw some stuff out there! There is no press embargo, non-disclosure agreement, or veil of silence. Testing isn’t closed because it’s a secret; it’s just easier to manage issue tracking with a smaller group.

Once again, thanks to you all!

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#GameJoltNext: A Call for Testers

We need real human input to help us make #GameJoltNext as awesome as possible.

If you've been following these posts, you know that we are full-steam-ahead building a new Game Jolt from scratch. Of course, it's been in the oven for a while, so we have a lot more than scratch now.

We'll be launching pieces of the new site for testers in a week or so. Looks like we need some testers!

Want to get early access to #GameJoltNext and help us work out the kinks? We need feedback from actual, regular users. You'll get to test out new features and provide input that will directly shape the new site.

The site is still changing rapidly and nothing is set in stone, so this is an opportunity to have a say in the direction of the new Game Jolt before it's publicly launched!

Interested? Apply here!

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#GameJoltNext: Authentication

Over the weekend I spent some time getting the auth section nailed down a bit for #GameJoltNext: login, logout, forgot password—all that jazziness. Rather than doing just a series of images, I figured I’d do things a bit differently for this update: a video! Yay!

I’ve spent quite a bit of time working on making things fluid with smooth transitions and animations and I’m hoping the above video captures it well.

When you click on “join” or “login” on the site, it actually takes you to this full-screen view so that you can go about your business without the usual distractions in the shell. Clicking the Game Jolt logo will bring back the main shell so you can navigate the site.

And for a fun little surprise, it actually now records in-browser the game pages that you visit while being logged out. Then when you click “login” or “sign up”, a full-screen image from your game is overlaid in the background. This way, it’s tailored towards what the user has already seen. Just another reason for you to upload screenshots into your game pages, even if you don’t think they’re needed. We can use that data!

So, for example, if I had visited the game page for the recently featured Naut, I may get a page tailored towards that game:

And if you don’t have any game view history, we pick some images from some of the site’s top games and rotate them through. =]

Just remember, since it’s still being actively developed, quite a bit will change, and when you all get to play around with it, it may look completely different. Until next time!

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#GameJoltNext Update: Friends

Game Jolt has always been focused on community. It started with the idea of making a place where gamers and developers can come together. What’s cooler for a gamer than to actually be able to interact, communicate, and even play games with their favorite developers? And what’s more valuable to a developer than actually interfacing directly with your audience? After all, we are all just people! Hell, most developers are gamers, too!

It’s been really cool so far, and for #GameJoltNext (that's right, it's got a hashtag now) we’re going to continue that idea and build upon it. It’s what Game Jolt is about!

So, I figured a nice way to start introducing the new look and feel of #GameJoltNext would be to take a peek at the integration of friends on the site. Game Jolt has had friendships as a feature for a while, and while we’re not adding any features on top of it just yet, I'm going to show you some of how we’ve ported the feature over to the new site.

On the current site, it's a bit tricky figuring out how to friend a user. It's in a little box on the user's profile page as a button with no label. Just a little face with a +. Yikes!

On the new site, we put it front and center on the user's profile page. I'm going to keep the rest of the page secret for now, but use your imagination!

There are new and improved "growl" messages (the green/pink boxes that show up on the bottom left of the screen). They are bigger and have way more functionality (though we'll keep it at that until another post) than the old ones do--oh! and they now auto-disappear after a bit. Check 'em out:

From there, your navigation bar will update and let you know that you have a new friend request. This is similar to the current site, although it's designed a bit differently.

If I click into it I can see that I've sent a request to @indiegamehunt.

And I can see the friend requests that have been sent to me in the other tab.

The biggest difference on the new site is the tab that shows the requests you've sent out. This has allowed us to completely get rid of the Friends page in your dashboard. Why would we want to do that? Well, it's simple! You can now do everything using only the _shell_ of the site. Your friends list shows up in the chat on the right, your sent/received requests show up in the top nav, and you can actually even approve/delete friend requests on profile pages!

And, after all is said and done, we are F4L (that's Friends 4 Life, yo).

Oh, and as a fun little treat, there is a new loading graphic for when things are *ahem* loading or processing.

Cute, isn't it? Well, it's even better in motion, trust me. They walk and walk and basically get nowhere. But, uh, yeah...

I know it's not much, but this is one of the features that was built out this week (along with many others), and I figured I may as well show it off. Hopefully it's given you an idea of some of the new design elements.

I'll try to post something else soon for you to take a look at! We'll be slowly revealing more and more of the full shell--and the rest of the site--over the next few weeks!

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ON THE ROAD TO THE NEW GAME JOLT

New Game Jolt? The next Game Jolt. Next Game Jolt? Yeah.

Whew. A lot has happened this year!

We've become the most visited site for playing indie games. That’s somewhat insane considering we only allow free games, which is really a small slice of the indie gaming pie. It’s amazing because these are generally games from beginner developers and hobbyists, small jam games from full-time devs, and generally just games created for the love of it!

We hit over 1 million unique users in a month. That number has since gone up quite a bit.

We launched Game Jolt Jams and opened it up to the community. Many amazing jams have been run through it.

We launched Fireside (what is this thing anyway?)

We ran a jam with the biggest YouTuber there is, producing almost 800 games, which makes it one of the biggest non-recurring game jams ever.

What Have You Done for Me Lately?

Despite all of these accomplishments, you may have noticed that development of the main site has been a bit stagnant. The site hasn’t changed much in 5 years. It looks almost the same as it did when Game Jolt first launched. There haven’t been any new features on the site for almost a year. “Why has this happened!?” you plea.

Well, it’s pretty simple, actually. We’re working on a new Game Jolt. The next Game Jolt (maybe we’ll finally be able to get rid of that beta tag)!

The current site is rooted in a handful of ideas I had about 10 years ago. But it’s not everything I had imagined. I never got around to building out all the features I envisioned. The existing site looks like it was designed 5 years ago…because it was. We’ve gotten pretty far with it, but it’s time to bring Game Jolt into the modern era of web development.

This year, I actually made a pretty detailed prototype of the new site using some new technologies that I had been messing around with. I liked it so much that I decided I wanted to move the whole site over to this new Game Jolt, but I knew it would take a lot of work to build it out into production-ready code. I would have to recode even the tiniest things from the current site from scratch.

I knew I wanted to work on the new Game Jolt, but I had a lot of feature requests and bug reports piling up. If I were to build these features into the current site, I would then have to duplicate the effort for the new site. This would double the development time. So, instead, I decided to freeze development of Game Jolt’s current feature set.

What's the Big Idea?

The new Game Jolt is a response to all of the feature requests we’ve gotten, as well as all the ideas—old and new—that I haven’t had time to implement. Starting from scratch gives us a much better base from which to move quickly and efficiently with new development. Because of the way it’s implemented, the new codebase will also solve a lot of problems and annoyances that people have brought up over time (like chat loading slowly, commenting causing the page to refresh, etc.)

The real beginning of the new Game Jolt came with the creation of Game Jolt Jams. We had been running jams for over 4 years, and a long time ago I decided I wanted to eventually open up the system for everyone to use. I figured this would be a good time to do it, and at the same time I could build out a huge library of code to use in the new site. So that’s what I did! Game Jolt Jams produced a lot of the foundation that I would eventually use to build the new Game Jolt. It’s one of the reasons Jams took so long to build. Everything was done from scratch. Every decision had to be rethought. Nothing was fast or easy. But it was worth it.

So, a new Game Jolt is coming, and every last bit is completely rebuilt from scratch. What does this mean for you?

Change Can Suck!

I know that redesigns can be scary for regular users of a service. You’re used to the way things have been for the past few years, and it can be a shock to have the carpet pulled out from under you.

I want to let you know that I’m understanding of that and I’ll be doing everything I can to ensure a happy migration. Yes, the new Game Jolt will look different (and, we think, better), but it will still have all of the same features you’re used to. Things may shift around a little here and there but the first push won’t actually make too many modifications to the current site. The first priority is to rebuild it using a nicer framework, making it easier to implement more changes in the future. After that is when the real fun begins.

Staying Updated Doesn't Suck!

I’ll be doing periodic posts to update you all with what I’m working on. I’m shooting for weekly posts, but it may end up being more often than that. My goal is to have the new site 100% complete in a couple of months. I’m working full-time on it now and I can’t wait to show off some of the new features in the coming weeks!

We’ll talk again soon. In the meantime, stay indie…

or else! (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻

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Sneak Peek at... GAME JOLT JAMS

Aren't game jams great? We're pretty much in love with them. Nothing spurs creativity and energizes the community quite like a game jam.

How would you like to organize and run a jam? I bet it's crossed your mind at least once or twice. But it sure seems like a lot of work. There must be a better way!

Now there is. The Game Jolt Lab has been working overtime to bring you the smoothest, most user-friendly game jam system on the interwebs, and it's almost ready for prime time.

We've done everything we can to make it ridiculously easy to organize a jam. It takes mere moments to create a new jam, complete with URL, hashtag, and voting system. Once it's set up, the jam basically runs itself. For participants, entering something in the jam is as simple as putting a hashtag in the game's description on Game Jolt.

Two jams are currently road testing the system. Check them out:

Easter Egg Jam (currently in the voting phase)

Gender Jam 2014 (now accepting entries)

Game Jolt Jams should be ready for your pleasure in about a month or so. You can bet we'll keep you posted!

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Cryptic Twitter Notation Decoded

If you follow our tweets (and if you don't, what's up with that?), then you may have noticed some unfamiliar notation in the last couple of featured game announcements.

Appearing just before the hashtag #gjfeatured are some letters enclosed in square brackets. It may be a single letter, or it could be several, and there might be a colon separating two sections. The code could conceivably be as long as [wmlo:hjufs].

I can imagine your eyes bugging out, but it's actually a simple notation designed to let you know, at a glance, for which platforms a particular game is available. Here's the key:

w = Windows

m = Mac

l = Linux

o = Other

A colon separates the downloadable distributions from the browser builds:

h = HTML

j = Java

u = Unity

f = Flash

s = Silverlight

Credit for the inspiration goes to @TokkieMonster, who suggested we add platform information to featured game tweets. It got us thinking about what would be the best way to clearly deliver that information in the fewest amount of characters. We hope you like the results!

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RIP Game Jolt, Long Live David Jolt!

If you're a regular visitor to the site, you might have noticed some changes today. You may be confused or befuddled. Don't worry, I'm David DeCarmine, and I'm here to explain everything.

Some of you know me as CROS. I'm the guy who runs Game Jolt. I'm the guy who serves you up indie gaming treasures day after day, week after week, year after year. And I always will. Forever.

I've worked too hard for too long for my name to be swept under the rug while developers, youtubers, mods, and who knows what else reap all of the glory. Game Jolt is my site. My creation. Without me, you wouldn't even know what indie games are--heck, there may not even be indie games.

In a nutshell, I'm finally taking the credit I deserve. I was born to be a celebrity. You're welcome.

This is only the beginning of a transition, for Game Jolt will soon be no more. All content and future operations will eventually be moved over to an electrifying new site: David Jolt!

I hope that you all will join me for this exciting new chapter in my life and the history of indie games.

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http://gamejolt.fm/ is a new project that was thrown together late last night, born of boredom and procrastination. It's bare-bones and buggy in its current state, but it's already a lot of fun!

It's basically a music player that randomly streams songs from all of the game soundtracks that have been uploaded to Game Jolt. Just keep in mind that we'll be improving it and adding a bunch of new features soon.

It's also a cool new way to discover games on the site. You can just click the currently displayed thumbnail or title to open up the game's Game Jolt page.

Anyway, check it out: http://gamejolt.fm/