Game Jolt
Game Jolt is a social community platform for video games, gamers and content creators, hosting fan-run communities for over 1,644,492 games. The platform is home to hundreds of thousands of creators and gamers from all corners of the world - ranging from novice gamers and indie developers, to high-profile influencers and some of the most reputable studios in the industry. It is also home to thousands of artists and animators drawing and animating for their favourite games, and sometimes doing so to produce games. Game Jolt was founded by Yaprak and David Decarmine. It is now used  more for creating posts, similar to how it is done in Twitter. History. David began development of Game Jolt in 2002 at the age of 14. His intention was to create a platform for gamers where new indie games could be discoverable and quickly playable, and where feedback could be provided directly to the developers, allowing them to continue improving their games. At launch in July 2004 Game Jolt included a public account system, game forums, a chatroom and a large games database, with each game uploaded with the creators' permission. In December 2008, Game Jolt added a game distribution  portal for Flash, Unity and Java games. Game Jolt started accepting browser-based HTML5 games in February 2013. Game Jolt Jams released in early 2014 as a service to allow users to create their own game jams that integrated with the main site. A new site launched in 2015 featuring a responsive design, automated curation for both games and game news articles which weighs how recent a game was uploaded and how popular it is ("hot") and filtering options on game listings for platform, maturity rating and development status. In November 2014 Game Jolt announced the "Indies vs PewDiePie" game  jam, partnering with the popular Youtuber Felix "PewDiePie" Kjellberg. Developers were given a weekend (21–24 November) to create a game with the theme of "fun to play, fun to watch" to suit the Let's Plays entertainment style. Users could rate entries afterwards until December 1 when the scores were counted up. The prize to the top 10 rated games was Felix playing the games on his channel as a means of promotion for the developers, although later he played other entries. Game Jolt partnered with Felix, Sean "Jacksepticeye" McLoughlin and Mark "Markiplier" Fischbach to host "Indies vs Gamers" in  July 2015. The requirements for entries were arcade games using the GJAPI highscore tables, to be made between the July 17–20 and the top 5 games were played on the partner's YouTube channels. In January 2016, Game Jolt released source code of the client and site's frontend on GitHub under MIT license. An online marketplace was announced in April 2016 and released the following month in May, allowing developers to sell their games on the site. In January 2022 Game Jolt removed Adult games from the site, stating in an e-mail to developers that the site had  become "social media platform" and they "had to make decisions around the direction and future of the brand which has now included the removal of hosted games with explicitly adult content." API. The Game Jolt Application Programming Interface (usually known as the GJAPI) allows any developer using a game development platform that supports HTTP operations and MD5 or SHA-1. Game Jolt advertises that the API can: Competitions. Game Jolt has hosted numerous official game development contests with varying requirements and rewards. "Contests" are differentiated from "Jams". A contest on Game Jolt refers to a competition wherein developers have a single  theme their game must follow if they enter the competition, and an ordered subjective top games selection is found either from judging by the staff or, with the two recent Indies VSs competitions, community voting. A jam however has no requirements and only an optional theme, which may or may not be judged but with no prizes for the winners. Jams. Jams are hosted on the weekend. Unlike the contests there is no theme- just work on new games or WIPs. Developers are encouraged to livestream, post screenshots and tweet about whatever they're developing, with no winners are produced  at the end. April Fool's Day. Since 2015 Game Jolt has made announcements on April Fools' Day, often implementing site features that remain accessible beyond 1 April.