Game Off is an annual

game jam A game jam is an event where participants try to make a video game from scratch. Depending on the format, participants might work independently, or in teams. The event duration usually ranges from 24 to 72 hours. Participants are generally program ...

celebrating open source created by

Lee Reilly Lee may refer to: Name Given name * Lee (given name), a given name in English Surname * Chinese surnames romanized as Li or Lee: ** Li (surname 李) or Lee (Hanzi ), a common Chinese surname ** Li (surname 利) or Lee (Hanzi ), a Chinese ...

in 2012 and sponsored by

GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, co ...

. 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 The Global Game Jam™️ (GGJ) is an annual distributed game jam. Inspired by the Nordic Game Jam, and created by Susan Gold, Ian Schreiber, Gorm Lai and Foaad Khosmood, originally developed under the International Game Developers Associati ...

, it encourages collaborative game development and promotes the use and sharing of

open source software Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Op ...

Intellectual property and licensing

The use of open source code and freely availably 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 The MIT License is a permissive free software license originating at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the late 1980s. As a permissive license, it puts only very limited restriction on reuse and has, therefore, high license co ...

and some assets made available under CC-BY-NC 4.0 licenses.

Past Themes

Competition Structure

Game Off I and II required participants to "

fork In cutlery or kitchenware, a fork (from la, furca ' pitchfork') is a utensil, now usually made of metal, whose long handle terminates in a head that branches into several narrow and often slightly curved tines with which one can spear foods ...

" an empty GitHub source code repository. Many other game jams and

hackathon A hackathon (also known as a hack day, hackfest, datathon or codefest; a portmanteau of hacking and marathon) is an event where people engage in rapid and collaborative engineering over a relatively short period of time such as 24 or 48 hours. Th ...

s 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 Itch.io (stylized as itch.io) is a website for users to host, sell and download indie games. Launched in March 2013 by Leaf Corcoran, the service hosts over 500,000 games and items (assets, ebooks, music) . Itch.io also allows users to host ...

, 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 gam
Singularity
There were 329 successful submissions.

References

{{Reflist

External links

Game Off website
Programming contests Game jams