This year's GitHub Game Off is over. You can view some of the top-rated games as voted on by the developers themselves here.
Game Off is an annual game jam, where participants spend the month of November creating games based on a secret theme. Participate individually, or as a team. Use whatever game engines, libraries, and languages you like.
The theme for this year’s Game Off is MOONSHOT.
moonshot – noun
- an extremely ambitious and innovative project
- the act of launching a spacecraft to the moon
- a hit or thrown ball that travels a great distance with a high trajectory
moonshot thinking – noun
- a type of thinking that aims to achieve something that is generally believed to be impossible.
Use “moonshot thinking” and interpret the theme however you like. Let it be the inspiration for your creation. If you need some ideas think about:
- A roguelite, lunar lander style game where you literally get one shot at landing on the moon
- A platform game, where the hero jumps across the surface of the moon firing shots at the enemy
- A game about traveling back in time to make an impactful change
- A game about solving a huge/world problem with some ridiculous technology
Let your imagination run wild and create a game loosely based or inspired by the Moonshot theme using whatever game engines, libraries or languages you prefer before December 1, 13:37 PT. Work alone or as a team. Most importantly, have fun!
🕹 How to participate
- Create a game based on the theme that's announced on November 1st.
- Sign up for a free GitHub account if you don't already have one. It's free!
- Join the Game Off on itch.io. If you don’t already have an itch.io account, log in with your GitHub account.
- Create a new public GitHub repository to store the source code and any assets you’re able to share for your entry and push your changes before December 1 13:37 PDT.
- Submit your game through itch.io.
🕹 Help—I’ve never created a game before!
With so many free, open source game engines and tutorials available online, there’s never been an easier (or more exciting!) time to try out game development.
Are you…
- Into JavaScript? You might be interested in Phaser.
- Comfortable with C++ or C#? Look at Godot, Unity and Unreal Engine.
- Proficient with Python? Check out Pygame or Godot (Godot uses GDScript, which is similar to Python).
- Dangerous with Java? Take a look at libGDX.
- In love with Lua? Check out LÖVE or Defold. Like retro games too? Drop everything and check out LIKO-12!
- Do you really like retro games? Maybe you can…
- Hack on a Roguelike dungeon crawler in JavaScript or Haskell.
- Crank out a text adventure in or some interactive fiction with Clojure or Ink (similar to Markdown).
- Craft that 8-bit console game you always fantasized about with PICO-8, Pixel Vision 8, TIC-80 (Lua), BASIC8 (Basic), or Pyxel (Python).
🕹 Help—I’ve never used version control, Git, or GitHub before!
- Git Documentation: everything you need to know about version control and how to get started with Git
- GitHub Help: everything you need to know about GitHub
- Any questions about GitHub? Visit the GitHub Community Forum.