Welcome to Lever Up, an alt ctrl game jam and controller workshop by the MAGFest Indie Arcade and Arcade Commons! Join us in making a slider controller, building an alt ctrl game designed around a unique slider-based control scheme, and sharing it at Super MAGFest 2025 in January!

How the jam works

• Order from our parts list to get everything you need for your controller
• Follow our assembly documentation to build a slidey controller and program it to talk to a computer via standard keyboard inputs (this document will be up soon, and we'll message all jam participants once it's live!)
• Join us in the Arcade Commons Discord to talk to other jammers
• Steal our code, and upload it to your microcontroller
• Make a game in 4 days, and share it here
• See selected games on a custom cabinet at Super MAGFest in January 2025!

Note: To be eligible to shown on the MAGFest cabinet, games must be ready to run on Windows. Web games have issues when presented in a multi-cab format and we cannot promise that any games developed for a web platform will be playable at the event so please submit an exe if possible.

This is a remote jam! Jammers will be able to talk, ask questions & form teams on the Indie Arcade Discord.

The Controller

For this jam, you’ll be making a game that uses a custom slider controller design. Our controller has 2 sliders, each mapped to a row of keys on a keyboard, as well as a single utility button. When a slider is moved, the controller simulates keyboard presses as if you were running your hand along a row of the keyboard, with one slider mapping to `Q W E R T Y U` and the other to `Z X C V B N M`. The single button maps to the spacebar, acting as a start/pause/submit button (though you can use it for whatever action you need!) 

Buying and building a custom controller isn't mandatory for participation in this jam. You can emulate the functionality of these sliders by sliding your hand over your keyboard to help with development and playtesting, but the exact feeling of sliding up and down will be unique to the controller, and should factor into your game's design and implementation. If your game requires any keys that aren't on the slider/button design, it won't be playable with the custom controller, so limit all interact to those 14 keys and the spacebar.

Designing for Sliders

Although building the custom controller is optional for this jam, submissions should be designed with a slider controller in mind. Some things to consider:

• The sliders only send keypresses when they are moved between key thresholds (this is mostly so that they controller isn't spamming keystrokes all the time)
• What gameplay feelings can you get with a slider that might not be possible with standard controller or keyboard inputs?
• What happens if a player moves the sliders very fast, slamming the input direction from one end to the other?
• If you’re making a multiplayer game, what does a given player’s gameplay look like if all they have is a single slider?

The Theme

Though the controller is the main theme of this jam, we’ll post a conceptual theme here when the jam begins on December 6th.

Lever up at Super MAGFest 2025

We're building a cabinet that will run selected submissions at the Indie Arcade Expo at Super MAGFest in January 2025! The cabinet will use big ol' levers instead of sliders, but still map inputs to keys in the same way the slider controllers do at home! More build pics to come (as we actually build it).