LibreJam

Hello, and welcome to the home of the bimonthly game jam for libre games, LibreJam!

At the beginning of every other month, the jam begins, with a unique theme being released to add extra challenge. Participants have one week to develop and publish their game, working solo or in teams. Once time is up, all games are published to the site for others to view, and ratings are opened for seven days, before a winner is announced.

Current Jam

Status: GO!
Week number: 202104
Theme: Snowed in
Theme announced at: 2021-04-01 00:00 UTC
Submissions end at: 2021-04-07 23:59 UTC
Ratings end at: 2021-04-14 23:59 UTC

Rules

All code and assets must be provided under an FSD-approved license (see also: The Free Software Definition). Any software required to run the game must also be available under an OSI-approved license.
Content must be appropriate and safe for work (no hate speech, no harrassment).
Games must fit the theme in some way.
Important mechanics must be developed within the duration of the game jam. For example, you are not allowed to submit a “match 3” game without adding any unique mechanics to it. You are, however, allowed to reuse code and assets, so long as you are adding new value to them through your new mechanics.

Submissions

Once your game is finished, submit it by posting it in the mailing list. The subject line should be in the format “[SUBMISSION] WEEK - Game name here”. Obviously, you should replace “WEEK” with the week number (top of this page).

You can either attach your game’s source code (in .tar. or .zip format) to the email or upload it to an external source (please do this if your game is larger than 4 MiBs!). If you choose the latter, please provide a SHA256 checksum, so we can verify the file has not changed. On UNIX systems, you can find the SHA256 checksum of a file easily using the sha256sum command.

Note that the mailing list is not private; your message will be displayed publicly in the archive, and others will be able to reply to it with their own comments and feedback.

Ratings

Anyone can submit ratings for games, not just jam participants. To submit a rating, reply to the submission post for the game in question on the mailing list for the following categories:

Overall (1-9)
Theme (1-9)
Graphics (1-9)
Sound (1-9)

Ratings are accepted until the end time given at the top of the page, after which ratings for all games are tallied and winners are announced.

Socialising

Come and chat with us in the IRC channel #librejam on Freenode. Here you can brainstorm, team up and chat about development!

If you have a question about the jam, write in the mailing list.

Guidelines

In addition to the above rules, there are some guidelines that you might want to keep in mind while developing your game. These are not mandatory, but they’re generally good advice for helping you create an end product which is fun for everyone:

If you are submitting your game in a language other than English, please consider providing an English translation as well.
Write a build script which makes compiling your game from source easy.
- Many people are using devices with different software or libraries. As a result, it is often necessary for them to compile your game from source in order to play it.
- Creating an easy to use build script not only helps expand your audience, but it is also good software development practice in general, and reflects well on your competency as a programmer.
Allow players to rebind the controls. Not everyone uses a standard “QWERTY” keyboard layout. Permanently setting your game controls to common combinations like “WASD” can make life very difficult for such players.
Describe your game in your submission post. This will improve your chances of receiving feedback.