confoundingcalendar

Welcome back! Please join us for the 4th year of…

The CONFOUNDING Calendar!

We're creating a free online advent calendar of games: a collection of tiny puzzle surprises for you to play each day in December. 

Starting December 1st, we’ll be sharing new games at confoundingcalendar.itch.io every day of the month! 

But where will we get these wonderful puzzles? From you, of course! We’re asking for submissions here.

TL;DR:

Make a one-screen, one-level puzzle game using this color palette that’s playable in-browser. Submit your game to this form. We will be selecting and curating twenty-five games that most fit what we want to see in the Calendar: small spaces, playfulness, and unconventional approaches.

Here are the restrictions: 

• Your game must be only one screen and only one level. We’re trying to keep the games small. (The one screen restriction means the “camera” shouldn’t move!)
• Your game must only use this color palette. 
• Your game must be playable in-browser through itch.io. (You will need to hide or restrict your game. Check out this guide for help.) (A good tool for making small games is puzzlescript.net, but you can use anything to make your game.)
• Your game should be a puzzle: the main focus should be problem solving. Beyond that, feel free to use a broad interpretation of that term. We love variety!
• Your game should be safe for work. 

There is a major change for this year: for the first 25 days of the month, we will be selecting and releasing one game per day. We debated this for a while and decided to try something new. Here are our thoughts behind this change:

• Our vision for the Calendar started as “one tiny puzzle surprise per day, playable in a few minutes, all month long.” We love the idea of people keeping up with it and looking forward to a new little puzzle-toy each day. Testing and releasing so many games (over 70 last year!) takes a lot of time and also dilutes that focus, so we’re going to try a more curated approach and see how it feels. We are so grateful for how many people have become enthusiastic participants in our little event, and we hope everyone will still show up this year! Thank you so much for making the Calendar what it is. Our current plan is to release the remaining submissions in bigger batches after the 25th.

What does this mean for you, a game designer? It means that there are now additional criteria to keep in mind when making your game. Meeting these criteria isn’t a guarantee your game will be one of the twenty five showcased games, but it does make it more likely.

• Small space: Every year we receive submissions that try to skirt around the size requirement and squeeze in a big game. Think of this as the main design challenge of the Calendar: we’re really looking for compact, manageable, single puzzles, not a full game compressed into a tiny space.
• Playfulness & unconventional approaches: This is definitely a place to experiment and try something different that tests the boundaries. Your game does not need to be boxes on a 2D grid! The more something stands out from the norm, the more likely we’ll want that variety present in the Calendar lineup. We love games with unusual structures, mechanical tricks and jokes, and/or delightful surprises.

The deadline for submissions is November 30th. Please only submit one game. Any questions can be directed to @corey_hardt on Twitter, or @coreyhardt or @_beekie on Discord. Thank you to Le Slo and Pancelor for joining us to help with testing this year. We hope you’ll participate, and we hope you’ll enjoy this year’s Confounding Calendar!