Game Off is an annual game jam, where participants spend the month of November creating games based on a secret theme.
The judging period is on now! Participants - please play and rate as many games as can before Jan 3rd, 2022.
The theme for this year's Game Off was...
BUG!
Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to create a game between now and December 1 incorporating the theme somehow. After a few weeks of playing and rating the games by participants, the winners will be announced shortly thereafter.
As usual, you may interpret ‘BUG’ however you wish …
BUG (/bəɡ/)
noun
- an insect or creepy crawly
- an unexpected defect, fault, flaw, or imperfection in code or equipment
- a microorganism (such as a bacterium or virus) causing illness or disease
- a concealed listening device
- a sudden enthusiasm
- a river in Ukraine
verb
- to bother or annoy or pester
- to plant a listening device
- to “bug off” or “bug out”
Or go rogue and ignore the dictionary:
- B.U.G acronyms e.g. Being Unusually Good or Big Urban Game or something
- Dad jokes / puns like deterants / tick tock / spelling bee / flywheel
Note: Nobody’s judging the code quality, so lots of bugs are both expected and accepted. Focus on having fun 😉
Good luck, have fun, and sign up now if you haven’t already! <3
🟣 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 PT.
- Submit your game through itch.io.
🟣 Voting
Voting will open shortly after the jam ends and is open to everyone who’s submitted a game. Entries will be rated on the following categories: Overall, Gameplay, Graphics, Audio, Innovation and Theme Interpretation. Voting will end on Jan 1st at 13:37 PT.
As always, we'll highlight some of our favorites games on the GitHub Blog, and the world will get to enjoy (and maybe even contribute to or learn from) your creations.
🟣 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!
- Fond of Flutter? Take a peek at Flame.
- Gearing up with Go? You might want to look at Ebiten.
- 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
