It’s the moment you’ve all been waiting for. Are you ready?

This year’s Game Off theme is cliché!

Cli-ché
noun
1. a phrase or opinion that is overused and betrays a lack of original thought.

If you’ve heard a phrase a million times, chances are it’s a cliché. For example, “a blast from the past,” “play your cards right,” “it’s an uphill battle,” “avoid it like the plague,” and “don’t deploy on a Friday.” You catch my drift?

Take one (or more) of your favorite clichés and use them to inspire your game.

Need some ideas? Here are a few that spring to mind for me:

  • A shoot ‘em up involving a loose cannon.
  • A dating simulator focused on how opposites attract.
  • A clicker game prompting you to pluck low-hanging fruit.
  • A racing game where you’re skating on thin ice.
  • A football game where you frustrate the opposition by moving the goalposts.
  • A beat em’ up where you have to throw in the towel.
  • Maybe even some clichés from the movies—ammo that never runs out, deceptively fast zombies, exploding cars.
  • Or clichés from video games—conveniently-placed exploding barrels, food healing critical injuries.

The sky’s the limit! I’ve created a list of clichés (almost 4,000) that you might find helpful if you’re really stuck.

Join the jam on itch.io and submit your entry before December 1 13:37 PT.

What is Game Off?

Game Off is our annual game jam challenging folks to build a game based on a theme.

How to participate

  1. Create a game based on the theme (some cliché).
  2. Sign up for a free GitHub account if you don’t already have one. It’s free and I assure you I’m not on any sort of commission!
  3. Join the Game Off on itch.io. If you don’t already have an itch.io account, you can sign in with your GitHub account.
  4. Create a new public GitHub repository to store the source code and any assets you’re able to share for your entry and push your changes before December 1 13:37 PT.
  5. Submit your game through itch.io.

Voting

Voting will open shortly after the jam ends and is open to everyone who’s submitted a game.

Entries will be rated on the following categories: Overall, Gameplay, Graphics, Audio, Innovation, and Theme Interpretation. We’ll highlight some of our favorites games on the GitHub Blog, and the world will get to enjoy (and maybe even contribute to or learn from) your creations.

Help, I’ve never created a game before!

With so many free, open source game engines and tutorials available online, there’s never been an easier (or more exciting!) time to try out game development. In addition to the popular game engines like Unreal Engine, Unity, and Godot there are game engines for almost every language, for example:

All of these websites have great documentation, tutorials, and a wonderful welcoming community behind them ready to help.

You can use whatever game engine you like (or none at all), whatever language you like, and build for whatever you platform you like—Web, Windows, macOS, Linux, and mobile. Heck, we’ve even had NES and Commodore 64 submissions in the past.

Looking for a teammate or to offer your skills to an existing team? In need of advice on what language or game engine to use? Ask in the Game Off community on itch.io, or in the community-run Discord server.

Help, I’ve never used Git or GitHub before!

Good luck, have fun, and

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