Howdy! This newsletter marks the 1 year anniversary of starting plusone (although the first widely distributed newsletter was plusone weekly #10). To mark the occasion I wanted to talk about some changes I've been thinking about in order to ensure this newsletter's long-term viability.
But first, I'd like to make sure everyone knows to check out the submissions to the Summer Incremental Game Jam 2026. As before, I have deliberately not featured any of these in the newsletter so as to not affect the rating process. And if that's not enough game jam entries for you, the GMTK jam, the largest jam on itch, also wrapped up and has its own submissions. This is not an incremental game specific jam, but due to its sheer size there's incidentally tons of incremental games involved. This might also be a good time to use the new filters on each newsletter's "all new games" list to see all the jam entries.
I've been thinking about governance a lot lately (wrote a whole page on it in fact) and it's been making me think about how to apply it to plusone, which for a year now has been running as a solo project, a vacuously benevolent-dictator-for-life governance model, and is highly vulnerable to me being unavailable for even a week, like what happened last year when my kid had a long stay in a hospital.
To that end, I've been thinking about how I might apply some of the ideas I've been thinking about to plusone, in order to make it more viable long-term. In particular, I'm thinking of splitting the curation queue into multiple queues that can each be handled by different autonomous individuals/groups. So a queue for game jam games specifically, or for unreleased demos. They could specialize and determine criteria that work best for the specific types of games that enter their queue.
I think each queue could even have multiple people working on it to provide redundancy, and would have autonomy to decide things like adding new members or how they pick what to feature. There's other ideas here I'm interested in exploring as well, like overlapping queues. For now, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the ideas and, if you're interested in being involved, let me know.
Oh, also I've expanded my page explaining plusone to describe how the curation process works a bit better. If this was your first time learning of the curation queue, that page can help explain what's going on as part of each week's newsletter.