Game Off
Annual video game development event
Game Off is an annual game jam celebrating open source created by Lee Reilly in 2012 and sponsored by GitHub. Participants are given the entire month of November to build a game based on a theme-individually or as a team. Inspired by the Global Game Jam, it encourages collaborative game development and promotes the use and sharing of open source software.
01Intellectual property and licensing
The use of open source code and freely available assets is encouraged, but it is not a strict requirement. Participants are required to share the code in a public GitHub repository, but the creators own the intellectual property and may license the code however they like. E.g. the overall winner of Game Off V was Daemon vs. Demon, a game built with the open source Godot game engine, with the source licensed under the MIT license and some assets made available under CC-BY-NC 4.0 licenses.
02Past Themes
| Game Off | Theme |
|---|---|
| I (2012) | Forking, branching, cloning, pushing, pulling |
| II (2013) | Change |
| III (2015) | “The game has changed” |
| IV (2016) | Hacking, modding and/or augmenting |
| V (2017) | Throwback |
| VI (2018) | Hybrid |
| VII (2019) | Leaps and bounds |
| IX (2020) | MOONSHOT |
| X (2021) | BUG |
| XI (2022) | Cliché |
| XII (2023) | SCALE |
| XIII (2024) | SECRETS |
| XIV (2025) | WAVES |
03Competition Structure
Game Off I and II required participants to "fork" an empty GitHub source code repository. Many other game jams and hackathons have adopted this approach e.g. Netflix's Cloud Prize, and Canonical's Juju Charm Championship.
Game Off III required participants to choose an existing open source game jam entry to fork it as a starting point.
Game Off IV allowed participants to start with a new repository.
Game Off V was hosted on itch.io, and was recognized the 2nd most popular game jam by number participants and 5th most popular by number of submissions in their yearly review.
Game Off VI was also hosted on itch.io. Overall winner was the game Singularity. There were 329 successful submissions.
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Game Off”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Images, from Wikimedia Commons:
- Color Game Off Logo.png by Lee337reilly, CC BY-SA 4.0
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