Pixel Game Maker Awards (PGMA)

PGMA was conceptualized back in 2018 on Scratch, and over 8 years of running, it gained a reputation for being a stage for unseen talent and developing game devs to "shoot their shot". Put simply, our main goal is to help platform upcoming and aspiring young creators, though we often find ourselves serving this purpose in multiple ways! We're often seen as a very useful for a strong running start into more serious game development, a friendly challenge to push yourself to your limits, or just a good way to get back into your creative flow and motivation for the craft. We're proud to fill all these roles! Our vision continues to grow towards becoming one of the more prestigious game contests out there while still maintaining approachability for our target audience and keeping the contest format that differentiates us from other game jams!

Season 1 of PGMA was hosted back in 2018. As you can imagine, we were pretty loosely structured. Despite this, surprisingly this is the same core structure that we've kept up to this day! A fixed number of contestant going through a multi-round, elimination style format with a theme each round!

Season 2 is where we began to gain traction within the scratch community, and some of my (Probably_Not's) all time favorite contestants and creators overall had their most prominent era of visibility and attention. Weirdly enough, this era was when we still allowed contestants to use pre-made assets for their entries, which we no longer do.

We hit our stride pretty well in season 3, where we became much more organized with a solid judging panel, more defined requirements for joining, and adjusting our standards to allow self-made art only! Despite this, this was an era where we were struggling to find a reliable polling service to keep our public voting possible, one of the biggest reasons for our audience engagement!

Season 4 was probably our most experimental season in the earlier years, as it was a special edition where contestants were all randomly sorted into teams. On top of that, we reversed voting so that spectators would have to vote someone off instead of their favorite, which we saw the flaws in pretty soon after. Strange season... But as always, great contestants!

Season 5 marks our most smoothly executed season up to this point! This was a near-perfect execution of the formula we had created so far. However, these standard season formats tended to be really long, consisting of 5 rounds you'd have to survive, spanning over 6 months or even more! Needless to say, brutal.

Season 6 would easily stand as my all-time favorite PGMA season (at least through Scratch only). Here we reached the peak of our exposure on Scratch, and it seemed the Scratch team "discovered" us. So many good themes, featured projects, elaborate results, and legendary judges and contestants, some of whom would go on to become long-time contributors to PGMA.

Coming off the success of season 6, season 7 is when we realized it was time to expand on PGMA. This eventually culminated in the creation of the PGMA website and what would soon become the PGMA YouTube channel, all meant to set up a presence not exclusively contained within Scratch.

Season 8 marked the largest expansion in the game jam's history up to that point. Here is when we opened the contest to other platforms, more contestants, and worked on shifting the PGMA community to a more independent state. Thanks to this, this season without a doubt raised the bar more than any other before, giving us some of the best entries we've seen!