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Game Off is an annualgame jam celebrating open source created byLee Reilly in 2012 and sponsored byGitHub. Participants are given the entire month of November to build a game based on a theme–individually or as a team. Inspired by theGlobal Game Jam, it encourages collaborative game development and promotes the use and sharing ofopen source software.
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 sourceGodot game engine, with the source licensed under theMIT license and some assets made available underCC-BY-NC 4.0 licenses.[1]
| Game Off | Theme |
|---|---|
| I (2012) | Forking, branching, cloning, pushing, pulling[2] |
| II (2013) | Change[3] |
| III (2015) | “The game has changed”[4] |
| IV (2016) | Hacking, modding and/or augmenting[5] |
| V (2017) | Throwback[6] |
| VI (2018) | Hybrid[7] |
| VII (2019) | Leaps and bounds[8] |
| IX (2020) | MOONSHOT[9] |
| X (2021) | BUG[10] |
| XI (2022) | Cliché[11] |
| XII (2023) | SCALE[12] |
| XIII (2024) | SECRETS[13] |
| XIV (2025) | WAVES[14] |
Game Off I and II required participants to "fork" an empty GitHub source code repository. Many other game jams andhackathons have adopted this approach e.g.Netflix's Cloud Prize, and Canonical's Juju Charm Championship.[15][16]
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 onitch.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.[17]
Game Off VI was also hosted on itch.io. Overall winner was the gameSingularity. There were 329 successful submissions.[18]