Every November me and my co-organizer Tess spin up a pretty big project to bring the community together, everyone working on and playing some playful new puzzle games: The Confounding Calendar is taking game submissions from now through the end of the month, and then starting December 1st, we'll be debuting and releasing one game every day. The idea is to give people the experience of opening an advent calendar, one little surprise each day, but instead of bad chocolate, you get... cute miniature puzzles!
If you're not a gamedev and don't want to try your hand at making a little one-screen puzzle, that's ok! The festivities are intended to give as many people as possible free and easy access to a plethora of quick, fun experiences over the course of the month. (You can even play 100s of previous years games on the Calendar page right now.)
If you are interested in making a game to submit, thank you! The basics are that your game must be: playable in browser on itch.io, stick to the color palette we've chosen for this year, and very importantly, your game must be only one screen/level/stage. This is a task that many developers find to be quite a challenge, making something interesting and fun without succumbing to the temptation to try and squeeze in a whole big game... but we see it as the good kind of challenge! We want the experience of opening the new Calendar game each day to be short and sweet. So keep them small! Full submission details can be found on the Calendar page.
If you've been around for previous Calendars, we've made some changes and wanted to try something new this year: we're going to do a little bit more curation this time around, as we really want to focus in on the vision of "one game a day for 25 days." Although we were wary of changing the atmosphere and making the whole thing feel more competitive and less community-oriented, we're going to try out this more selective release schedule this year and see how it goes. Our current plan is to release the rest of the submissions in bigger batches after the 25th.
We're always hoping to see variety and playful, new ideas, so we encourage people to be bold and experiment. Whether you're brainstorming concepts to be a collaborator or just sitting back and waiting for a slew of new little games to be dumped in your lap, we hope you'll join us and enjoy this year's Confounding Calendar. :)
Disclaimer: Thinky Games is part of the Carina Initiatives and may have professional relationships with individuals and businesses related to the subject of this article. Please see our Editorial Policy for details.
