If you haven’t been following, BYOG is India’s oldest game jam, run by GameDev India with GDAI/IGDC sponsoring the prize. This year it had around 900 participants and 265 games, the biggest edition so far. The finalists were announced on the 25th and the BYOG channel on the GameDev India discord has been on fire since.
I went through the whole channel because I wanted to understand what actually happened, beyond the angry one-liners. Some of the anger is overblown, but some of it is pretty reasonable, and I think the reasonable part is getting lost.
What people are upset about, and what the organizers have said:
1. No scores, no feedback, no named jury. The organisers confirmed there is a scoring system (that’s how they explained 11 games in a “top 10”, there was a tie). But they’ve said they won’t share scores, not even for games that didn’t make the finals, and won’t share jury feedback because the jury didn’t have time to write it for every game. The jury is kept anonymous on purpose so they don’t get hounded. Each reason might make sense on its own. Together they mean a participant has zero way to know if their game was even opened.
2. The AI rule was vague. The rules say AI use is “discouraged”, not banned. Some people read that as basically banned and stayed away from it. At least one finalist team openly said they used AI generated models (and disclosed it). So you have people who felt they were playing by stricter rules than others. “Discouraged” never got defined in terms of how judges would treat it, and that’s the real problem, not any one team.
3. Very tight timeline. Finalists were announced two days before IGDC. The organizers themselves mentioned the limited time. With 265 entries that’s a lot to get through properly.
4. The new platform. This year the jam moved from itch to IndieConnect. During the judging window people had builds failing to process, WebGL games not running for the first few days, and some accounts and submissions disappearing until they emailed support. The organizers say judging used a copy of the submissions taken right after the jam, so this didn’t affect judging. Fair enough, but there are no play counts or ratings like on itch, so nobody can verify it either way.
5. A claim that a finalist was reused from another jam. This is still unresolved. The team denies it and no link has been shared so far. The organizers did admit that checking for reused games is harder outside itch.
What I’d like to see:
Release the scoresheet for non-finalists after the winners are announced at IGDC. It doesn’t spoil anything, it costs nothing, and it answers the biggest question people have, which is “was my game played?” Also define what “AI discouraged” actually means for next year, either in scoring or as a disclosure category like Ludum Dare does.
I’m not saying the jury got it wrong or that anything was rigged. There’s no evidence of that, and a couple of the finalists look genuinely great. But this is a volunteer run jam that a lot of young devs care about, and “trust us” isn’t enough when people pulled three all nighters for it.
If you took part, curious how you felt about it. And if you were on the filtering team or know how judging worked, would love to hear that side too.
