Need A Friday Night Challenge? Whip Up A Quick Game For The Public Domain Game Jam!

We’ve been running our annual public domain game jam for eight years now, and as far as game jams go, it’s always been on the long side of the scale with a full month for people to work on their games. A lot of jams are much shorter, and that’s worth keeping in mind today as we’re just a little more than 24 hours away from the deadline for the latest installment, Gaming Like It’s 1930! The ticking clock doesn’t mean you’ve missed the boat, it means now is the perfect time to get creative, whip up a simple game, and make your submission!

There are lots of great tools available that let anyone build a simple digital game, like interactive fiction engine Twine and the storytelling platform Story Synth from Randy Lubin, our game design partner and co-host of this jam (check out his guide to building a Story Synth game in an hour here on Techdirt). And an analog game can be as simple as a single page of rules. In past years, we’ve been blown away by the creativity on display in even the most basic of games, so if you don’t have anything to do tonight, why not try your hand?

Head over to the game jam page on Itch, read the full rules, and get some ideas about works you might use. Submissions close at midnight tomorrow, January 31st, and after that we’ll be diving in to choose winners in our six categories. For inspiration, you can have a look at last year’s winners and our series of winner spotlight posts that take a look at each year’s winning entries in more detail.

We’ve already had some excellent submissions, and we can’t wait to see what else comes in tomorrow night. Your game could be one of them!