Lost Frequencies 2025
A jam by Florence Games Festival—powered by Arcweave
🎮 About the jam
In Lost Frequencies 2025, participants have 3 weeks to create an interactive narrative about mysterious space signals broadcasting untold video game stories.
The jam offers an opportunity to explore the history of games. The theme of lost frequencies is a prompt to reimagine classic games and fuse them with modern mechanics.
🌐Community & Tutorials
- Florence Games Festival website: discover everything about this year's festival, its events, and guest speakers.
- Arcweave Discord server: join our Discord server and search for the #game-jam channel to connect with fellow creators and form teams for the game jam! Reach out for our community's support and expertise! Arcweave is easy to learn—even easier when your questions are quickly answered by our team!
- Arcweave tutorials: watch our official tutorial videos and see for yourself how quickly you can catch up with Arcweave's capabilities.
- Arcweave App : join Acweave for free
📅Key dates
- Start: February 18, 2025
- Submission Deadline: March 9, 2025
- Voting Period: March 10-23, 2025
- Winners Announcement: March 24, 2025
- Winning entries will be honoured at 42 Firenze Coding School in Florence on March 29. For those who cannot be present, the award ceremony will also be held remotely
🏆Prize pool
Prizes include:
🎯Theme: Lost Frequencies
Lost signals in space hide untold, retro video game stories. Explore and remix classic game elements with modern mechanics and narratives.
You can interpret the theme anyway you like—surprise us!
Here are some creative sparks:
- A mysterious arcade cabinet broadcasting to space
- Games that never made it to release, trapped in time
- Memory cards containing impossible save files
- A game development time capsule gone wrong
- Fusion of retro game genres with modern narrative techniques
- Lost archives of forgotten gaming eras
- Hidden messages in deep space frequencies
- Digital archaeologists in search of lost games
📝Submission format
Your submission must be a digital game that tells a fascinating story. Examples:
- Video games with a focus on storytelling
- Visual novel and interactive storytelling
- Interactive stories in Arcweave Play Mode
⚡Essential requirements
- The game must contain a story with significant choices
- All submissions must be written in English.
- Clear credits for third-party resources
- No offensive/inappropriate content
📜Audiovisual assets usage rights
Remember: whether you're using original or someone else's assets (including AI-generated content), you have the responsibility to clear rights and permissions for it including crediting appropriately. Arcweave and Jam's organisers hold no liability for any participant using unauthorised material.
⚠️Abusive content
Games and comments promoting hate speech, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, ageism, and any other form of discrimination against groups or individuals will not be tolerated by the jam organisers or the itch.io platform. The same applies to bullying of any kind and inflammatory comments (i.e. trolling).
🔞Sensitive content
If your game has sensitive content or/and is not suitable to be played by minors, please make this explicitly clear. Specify the game's age restrictions both in its description on its itch page and its Metadata fields. (See below, under "Submitting your game.")
🚀 Submitting Your Game
Long story short, after finishing your game, you'll have to create a zip and upload it on the game's itch page.
Let's take it step by step...
1. Register your game on itch.io
To submit your game, first make an itch.io page for it:
1. Log in on itch.io (or register, if you don't have an account already).
2. On your [Dashboard], choose “Create new project.”
3. Under the [Edit game] tab, fill in the game's info (title, genre, etc), with particular attention to the following:
- choose "$0 or donate" for [Pricing]. Players must be able to access the jam's submissions for free.
- under [Details]>[Description], write your game's info and a catchy blurb.
- if your game has age restrictions, add a detailed warning in the same [Description] field.
- on [Visibility & access], make sure you save the project as Public.
- give your game an iconic, killer cover and press [Upload Cover Image].
4. Upload your zip. Choose "Downloadable" for [Kind of project] and anything you like for [Release status].
4. Under the [Metadata] tab, under [Audience & Content], please specify any age restrictions that your game may have. If your game is not suitable for children of any age, please tick both boxes AND add a detailed warning in the previous section's [Description].
5. Once you submit your game, you'll see more tabs at the top of its page. Under the [More] tab, choose [Admins] and add the itch profiles of your collaborators in the game. They also need an itch account, if they are to vote separately in the jam.
That's it! You are now ready for your Jam submission!
💻 Arcweave Play Mode Submissions (optional)
If you've created your game entirely in Arcweave, you can submit it directly through Play Mode instead of creating a downloadable file.
- Make Your Game Public
- Open your project in Arcweave
- Click the Share icon in the topbar
- Select "Anyone with the link" and choose either "Can play only" or "Can view and play" (if you're happy with the public viewing your project's design, too)
- Copy the public link of your project's Play Mode.
- Submit to itch.io
- Create your game page as normal
- Include your Arcweave Play Mode link in the description
- Add "Playable in Browser" tag
2. Submit your game to the jam
To do so:
- On this page, click Join jam and Submit your project.
- Under [Existing game], choose your game from the dropdown menu.
- Submit!
Good luck!
🎲After the Jam
Every participant and their team members will be able to vote for other people's submissions.
⭐Voting criteria
Entries will be graded by participants according to these equally weighted criteria (25 percent each):
1. Narrative and branching
- Quality of writing and storytelling
- Effectiveness and significance of narrative choices
- Coherence and impact of the different narrative paths
- Creative interpretation of the theme
2. Visuals
- Quality and consistency of visual style
- Design of characters and environments
- User interface and readability
- Overall visual impact
3. Audio
- Sound design
- Music
- Overall sound atmosphere
4. Game Design and Gameplay
- Gameplay mechanics
- Narrative pacing
- Usability and user feedback
- Consistency between gameplay and story
🏅Prizes
Apart from the sheer thrill of entering a game jam, the Arcweave team will reward the 3 top-ranked games with prizes from the following prize pool:
- 1x Amazon Gift Card (€100)
- 1x Amazon Gift Card (€50)
- 1x Annual subscriptions to Arcweave pro (includes up to 3 seats).
Bonus:
- Free tickets to the festival for the finalists
- Selected games featured on Florence Game Festival website
- Top entries showcased in Arcweave's gallery
- All submissions permanently available on itch.io
Prize distribution:
- First place winner will get first choice from the prize pool
- Second place chooses from the remaining prizes
- Third place chooses the remaining option
After the announcement of the winners, each of them must contact the organisers to claim a prize from the pool. If a winner doesn't respond within 3 days from the jam's results, the prize will be transferred to the next highest-rated game. Please note that this only transfers the prize and not the winning position itself; in other words, even if a winner fails to claim a prize, their game is still listed as one of the winning ones.
🛠️Use of Arcweave
Although the use of Arcweave is optional, participants can benefit from:
- Real-time collaboration features
- Built-in branching storytelling tools
- Play mode for immediate testing
- Easy export options
- Output in interactive storytelling format directly to the web
Tutorials and basic documentation on Arcweave will be provided to all participants. Join Arcweave for free
👥Team guidelines
- Build solo or with a team - no size limits
- Clearly mark any third-party assets
- All contributions must be clearly acknowledged
❓FAQs
Q: Do I have to use Arcweave?
A: No, you can use any tool or engine that allows you to create interactive narrative experiences.
Q: What happens if I can't finish in time?
A: You can still submit an unfinished game, but please mark it clearly as a demo/prototype.
Q: Can I use pre-existing resources?
A: Yes, as long as you have the rights to use and properly credit the source.
So, what are you waiting for? Join the jam now, to stay up to date with news and notifications.
Visit Arcweave's Discord channel, to join users and devs discussions about the jam.
🎮 LET THE GAMES BEGIN! 🕹️