The third Portalarium-hosted, Shroud of the Avatar-themed Unity Scene Jam is taking place this weekend, having started at 6:00 PM CST on Friday. The theme of this Scene Jam is “It Takes a Village” and challenges developers to create a village scene. Also provided are some sample village buildings as assets.

For full Scene Jam details, of course, you should hit up this page at the Shroud of the Avatar website. Below is a summary of some key points.

Weekly winners will score some neat prizes, including Knight-level pledges. The grand prize winner will be awarded to the single best scene of the competition.

Scenes will be judged by Richard and the team based on quality, creativity, how closely it matches the announced challenge, and how closely it resembles something that would feel right at home in Shroud of the Avatar!

Winners will also be eligible for the grand prize of the entire Scene Jam series, who will receive a pretty amazing kit of stuff:

• Unity Pro License – $1500 value
• Oculus Rift – $300 value
• Alienware Grab Bag (Backpack, mouse, keyboard, headset) – $350 value
• UnityVS 1.2 License – $249 value
• Shroud of the Avatar Duke Pledge – $5300 value

The rules of the Scene Jams are fairly straightforward:

We’ll provide some assets with each jam but you can also use any assets which we can easily license. Unity store assets, free or purchased are fine. We’ll have a section in our submission process for you to list what assets were used in the creation of your piece so we can purchase them if we decide to use your piece. Custom created art is also fine as long as you are willing to grant us a free license to distribute the art with Shroud of the Avatar.

The final submission must be in the form of a Unity Package, run in Unity 4, and the upload must be started by 6PM on the Sunday after the start of the jam. We’ll include a document detailing how to turn a scene into a Unity Package. It might sound scary but it is really just a couple of clicks!

Any version of Unity is fine. The free version will work fine. You can use an older version of Unity if you choose to but we’ll only be testing the assets we distribute on Unity 4 and we’ll expect all submissions to work on Unity 4.

Scenes can be submitted here once complete, during the span of the competition.

The final Scene Jam will be held on November 1, 6PM CST (UTC-6). Good luck, crowdsource developers!