👑 Unity Room and Unity1Week

2022年 12月 12日
Indie Tsushin 2023 January issueThis article was featured in our 2023 January issue. Check out more articles and interviews in the full issue.
#Unity1Week game jam logo

Unity1Week: A one-week game jam on Unity Room!

Unity Room’s latest Unity1Week game jam is happening right now! Entrants have until 8PM on Sunday (JST) to submit a game. (Well, you actually have much longer than that, as you’ll soon see.) The theme this time around is “Re.” You can check out the hashtag on Twitter to see progress tweets, and once the week is up, see people playing the games and posting their results. It’s like a virtual month-long festival of Japanese indie game goodness!

Unity Room

Unity Room is a website run by naichilab where users can upload and play free browser games made in Unity. You don’t need an account to play the games, but you do if you want to rate or upload games. You can make an account and log in using your Twitter. There are thousands of games on the site, and it feels a lot like how Newgrounds, Albino Blacksheep, and other Flash portals used to feel back in the day. The games tend to be short and experimental, and it's a blast digging through the site and unearthing some real gems. I highly recommend checking it out and seeing what kinds of free browser games people are making!

If you plan on streaming games, please note that Unity Room has a marking for games that are OK to stream (実況OK). Please do not stream any games that do not have this mark on their game page, or games that say 実況NG (not good to stream).

実況OK (OK to stream)

Look for this mark: 実況OK (OK to stream).

実況NG (not good to stream)

If it says 実況NG (not good to stream), please do not stream it.

Unity1Week

Several times a year, Unity Room hosts the Unity1Week game jam. The jam starts once the theme is announced, and ends at 8PM the following Sunday. After that, there is an evaluation period that lasts for two weeks. And because the jam is pretty casual, you can upload your game at any point during the evaluation period! So in reality, you have three weeks to upload your game, but I guess #Unity3Weeks isn’t as catchy.

A graph showing the different evaluation criteria.

Clockwise from the top: Fun, Graphics/Art, Sound, Controls, Atmosphere, and Innovation.

Game ratings are broken into six categories: 楽しさ (Fun), 絵作り (Graphics/Art), サウンド (Sound), 操作性 (Controls), 雰囲気 (Atmosphere), and 斬新さ (Innovation), with a score of 1-5 for each. Note that you can rate all of the games on the site this way, not only the ones entered in the jams. If you go to the jam page, you can scroll to the 未プレイのゲーム (Unplayed Games) section and click ランダムに遊ぶ (random game) or if you are playing on stream, ランダムに遊ぶ(実況OK作品のみ) (random game that is OK to stream/record). The more games you play and rate, the smaller your pool gets and the more you will be helping out developers get feedback on their games!

A heading for Unplayed Games, with two buttons for Random Game and Random Game OK To Stream underneath.

Look for this section to see all the games you haven't yet played and rated!

You can also check out the #Unity1Week archives for past jams to get an idea of what kind of game to submit. Quite a few entries have gone on to get full releases on PC or mobile. For example, Invercity by Marudice was originally an entrant for the 「逆」 (reverse, opposite) jam, which recently got an updated release on Steam. Of course, even the games that don’t get updated after the jam still get played and rated by tons of people, so it’s a great way to strut your stuff and get your name out there!

Like previous #Unity1Week jams, Daikon and I plan to play all of the games and stream some that we liked a lot. You can check out our video coverage of past jams in the meantime. Good luck to all entrants, and I’m looking forward to playing all of your games on the 18th!