Announcing the Winners of the 3rd Player2 AI NPC Jam!
Cat & Sword takes the grand prize! We awarded $12,500 across category winners, a runner-up, special awards, ten $250 places.
If you’ve read our earlier recaps, you already know what these jams are about: pushing AI NPCs beyond gimmicks, and toward characters that feel alive, reactive, and memorable.
This round was no exception. We saw games that turned language itself into combat, web games that felt shockingly polished for a jam, and some truly unhinged NPCs that we’ll be thinking about for a long time.
Thank you to everyone who entered, shared builds in Discord, playtested each other’s games, and helped push the Player2 ecosystem forward.
How judging worked
We used the same philosophy as previous jams: combine human judgment with real player behavior, then resolve everything with a Condorcet voting method so that the final ranking reflects true head-to-head strength rather than just averages.
In practice, here’s what we did:
Three human judges independently ranked the games.
We also built a player metrics ranking from live data (things like unique players, time played, and how often people came back).
That player ranking was treated as two additional “votes”, alongside the judges’ ballots.
We then ran all of those rankings through a Condorcet algorithm (Schulze / beat-path) to decide the final order: whenever possible, the winner is the game that wins its one-on-one matchups against all others.
This setup rewards games that judges love and that regular players actually keep playing.
Overall Grand Prize — $5,000
🏆 Cat & Sword
Cat & Sword is a chatty idle RPG where you’re not the hero—you’re the sentient sword. You banter with your catgirl wielder, assemble a guild of oddball adventurers, and dive into dungeons while your AI-driven party quips, argues, and reacts to everything you do.
Huge congrats to the team behind Cat & Sword!
Category Winners — $1,000 each
📱 Best Mobile Game — Word War
Word War turns language into a battlefield.
🌐 Best Web Game — Epsilon IV
Epsilon IV allows you to step into the shoes of Cylil, a special agent of the Talos Corporation. On a return trip from a mission, you encounter a distress signal from the mining station Epsilon IV.
🛠 Best AI Mod — The Storyteller’s Voice
The Storyteller’s Voice shows what happens when you drop a dynamic narrator AI to take over Rimworld.
Runner-up — $500
🥈 Overdrive Tournament
The future is here! But the engines still roar! Drive in Overdrive Tournament and get teased by the announcer.
Special Awards — $500 each
🎨 Best Art — Croaking
Croaking is a 2D side-scrolling kingdom builder where you play as the Frog King, leading your loyal frogfolk to gather resources, build defences, and expand your swampy realm.
🧪 Most Unique Gameplay — Tales of Luanda: Birth of Stone
Step into the ancient Rift Valley, where legends walk among warriors.
🤪 Weirdest NPC — Shadows in the Skin
In Shadows in the Skin, you are a detective who wants to take a vacation to Miami on a luxury cruise ship. Our judges loved it.
$250 Awards — Next Ten Places
The following games each receive $250. These are projects that scored highly across judges and player behavior—games we believe are onto something and that we’d love to see continue.
(In alphabetical order:)
A.I.P.O.V
Cognitive Pulse
MLM Empire
Mystery Machine
Otherside Forest
Sir, Your Order, Please!?
Tend the Pen
The Collector
We All Lie
You Died, Actually
Some are tense mysteries, some are cozy, some are chaotic social experiments—but all of them did something interesting with AI NPCs, and all of them got strong engagement from players.
Thank you — and what’s next
To everyone who:
Pulled late nights hacking dialogue systems together
Fought with web builds and mobile controls
Wrote lore documents way too long for a jam
Hung out in the Discord, shared screenshots, and playtested each other’s games
—Thank you. You’re the reason these jams keep getting more interesting and stranger.
If you didn’t place this time, please don’t treat this as the end. Some of the most successful games on the platform started as “jam prototypes” that didn’t win anything at first. Keep iterating, keep shipping, and keep experimenting with what AI NPCs can be.
See you at the next jam. 🕹️💬
Our first AI Story Jam ($2750 prizes) https://itch.io/jam/player2-ai-story-jam
Next AI NPC Jam ($5100 prizes) https://itch.io/jam/player2-ai-npc-jam4