february/ march 2026: cookie cutter jam

17 march 2026

uwaaaah long time no blog post!

things have been so busy that i was not sure whether i will do a post for february at all

in a way, i didn't, since february has already passed, and the month of mars is like well under way. caesar is already dead, rip

however, this post is very much a february wrap-up, as i wanted to write about last month's humble goings on which kept me from updating the blog and the site in general, so here we freaking go:

the first thing that's happened at the start of february was the release of indiepocalypse issue #73, featuring a small vn under the title of office onna by yours very partially

i will not write a ton about that, since i already commited a little devlog about it on itch, if you are curious at all you can read that

i had been waiting for the issue nervously for a few weeks, but then i haven't had room to reflect on it whatsoever, since right as it released another thing came up, which is the actual topic of this post

long story short, right before indiepocalypse #73 came out, a few people over at smps twisted John's formidable arm, and tortured him into starting an impromptu game jam. bullying is bad, except in this case, because it resulted in something fun, and probably only one person was slightly hurt

and so the jam was on and it would in under 24h become known as the Cookie Cutter RM2k3 Jam

the premise of the jam was one that John "faraway" Thyer has had stashed away for a while:

take an rpgmaker project with nothing but a handful of predefined maps, and throw that upon crowd, to see what games will be cobbled together using only the available mappery

for an added note of comedy and despair John picked the 2003 edition of rpgmaker, featuring the dearly beloved ATB system, and a revised version of the 2000 rtp, including the new and "improved" faceset

i managed to make four very low effort spam entries towards the start of the jam, bake four little misshapen cookies right out the gate, which then freed up the time for me to bite on all the other delicious ones as they came out of the oven (and they came out a plenty)

character from rmaker 2003 in a map full of barrels. text says use the action button on a barrel to check what's inside

out of the four entries i made, the one im most proud of is goblin mines - a stupidly hard to beat minesweeperlike where you find out if you're worthy of the goblin gold

i guess the premise that was being tested in this jam was - how much creativity can be squeezed out of the several maps that were provided (considering also that rmaker 2003 does not allow for scripting, so all originality would have to come from utilizing the events system)

the answer turned out to be: fucking???? unlimited

unlimited power

60 entries have been submitted so far - 57 before the deadline, and several submitted late, and as of right now i think there are still some entries being worked on

i have currently played 54 out of 60, and am still playing through the remaining ones. as expected, some i will not be able to complete, due to the awful predicament i have of being horribly bad at video games. but i am trying to at least play enough of the harder entries to be able to somewhat fully appreciate them for what they are

and the entries span pretty much the full spectrum from serious systems-based rpgs on one end to absolute shitposts on the other

story-based games with sincere emotional tone, visual novels(?), puzzle games, parodies, and even within those categories each game has its own unique flavor that you can't find in other submissions. we got unbeatable boss fights, atomic piledrivers, lesbian kissing, characters getting fem'd on screen, a battle tank and a sheep that has something 2 do

from a more general perspective, the jam featured:

all in all, it went pretty hard

character from rmaker 2003 standing near body of water, while skeletons play trumpets and dance

real ones never left the zone - from i got turned into a girl and this yuri death angel will only turn me back if i can find all the hidden props by spiders

you know?

right before the jam (and to some extent as the jam was happening) i had a few conversations with people about making art and games, like - why we do that, and what all of that even means

maybe something's in the water, it just happens that a number of people i met and talked to recently have been mulling over the same things... or maybe artists are just always thinking about this crap? idk

what the experience of the jam taught me tho is that probably? maybe? the answer is kinda simple?

maybe it's all really just about involvement

maybe as long as you can bring your toys to the sandbox and play with the other kids, it doesn't really matter wtf all of you are doing

we are not here to uncover some great mystery about ourselves or about art - we're only here to make sense of what we're experiencing right now

and when it comes to the cookie cutter jam, whomst've of us could not wholeheartedly say:

πŸ‘ 🧚 🌲 πŸͺ πŸͺ¦ 🦈 🎣 🌊
❀️ ~.~ god i love piss ~.~ πŸ¦€
πŸ₯© πŸ’€ πŸ‘¨β€β€οΈβ€πŸ’‹β€πŸ‘¨ πŸ—‘οΈ πŸ‰ β›΅ πŸ‚ 🏠

warm considerations as always

peb

jam entries

what follows is a list of jam entries in submission order (for archival reasons):