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GitHub Game Off 2023 theme announcement

It’s the moment you’ve all been waiting for. Are you ready?

·@leereilly
| 4 minutes

It’s the moment you’ve all been waiting for. Are you ready? The theme for this year’s Game Off is SCALE!

Verb
 

  • to climb up something steep, such as a wall, building, or mountain.
  • to change the size of something e.g. make something smaller (scale down) or increase the size, amount, or importance of something (scale up).
  • to progress in a graduated series.
  • to remove the small flat hard pieces of skin from a fish.
  • to remove tartar and plaque from teeth.

Noun

  • a device for weighing people or objects.
  • one of the many very small, flat pieces that cover the skin of fish, snakes, etc.
  • a set of numbers, amounts, etc., used to measure or compare the level of something e.g., Farenheit, Richter scale.
  • the ratio between the real size of something and its size on a visualization.
  • a series of notes differing in pitch according to a specific scheme (usually within an octave).
  • an indicator having a graduated sequence of marks.
  • any of the small overlapping usually metal pieces forming the outer surface of scale armor.

You have until December 1 to build a game based on that theme and submit it through the game jam page on itch.io. Work alone or on a team. Use whatever programming languages, game engines, or libraries you like. And you’re welcome to use AI tools to help generate code, assets, or anything in between!

As always, you’re welcome to interpret the theme however you like. If you need some ideas to kickstart your creativity, here are a few game ideas that sprint to mind for me:

  • An infinite runner with occasional buildings that you need to scale.
  • A tower defense game where enemies scale in frequency and power.
  • A sokoban-style game with tiles being scales and boxes have different weights.
  • A traditional game, for example, Space Invaders that scales to local multiplayer or maybe even tens, hundreds, or thousands of players online.
  • A game where you have match a musical scale with your voice.
  • A roguelike where you control a penguin search for fish at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE).
  • A Kaiju beat-em up featuring Servants of Creatures Arriving Late to Earth (SCALE).
  • A Factorio-type game where you aim for Supply Chain and Logistics Excellence (SCALE).
  • Any kind of game featuring em… Sea… Creatures… And… L. L? Laughing… Erm… Elephants?
  • A Flappy Bird clone, but with a fish?

OK, maybe not that last one. We look forward to seeing your wonderful, weird, and wacky creative interpretations 😆

Join the Game Off now

How to participate

  1. Create a game based on the theme (announced on November 1 at 13:37 PT).
  2. Sign up for a free GitHub account if you don’t already have one. It’s free!
  3. Join the Game Off on itch.io. If you don’t already have an itch.io account, you can sign in with your GitHub account.
  4. 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 at 13:37 PT.
  5. Submit your game through itch.io.

Voting

Once submitted, your entries will be evaluated by fellow participants, and you’ll also have the chance to play and cast your votes on their games too.

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 January 8t 2024 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. For example, are you:

  • Just jumping into JavaScript? You might be interested in Phaser.
  • Comfortable with  C++ or C#? Look at Godot, Unity and Unreal Engine.
  • Raving about Rust? You might like Bevy.
  • Proficient with Python? Check out Pygame or Godot (Godot uses GDScript, which is similar to Python).
  • Jiving with Java? Take a look at libGDX.
  • Fond of Flutter? Take a peek at Flame.
  • Gearing up with Go? You might want to look at Ebitengine.
  • In love with Lua? Check out LÖVE or Defold or LIKO-12 (especially if you like retro games)!

And speaking of retro games, did you know 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).

The community-run Discord server is a great place to ask questions or look for teammates.

Help,I’ve never used version control, Git, or GitHub before!

Game Off is the perfect opportunity to check it out (version control pun intended)!

Good luck and have fun!

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Written by

Lee Reilly

Lee Reilly

@leereilly

Senior Program Manager, GitHub Developer Relations. Open source hype man, AI whisperer, hackathon and game jam wrangler. I write && manage programs, support dev communities, and occasionally ship something.

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