There’s One Week Left In The Public Domain Game Jam
Despite all that has happened (and boy does it seem like too much), the fact is we’re still less than one month into 2025 — and that means there’s still time to enter the latest edition of our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1929! The jam is open through January 31st, and you can enter right up until the clock ticks over to midnight Pacific Time, which means this is the final week.
Early submissions have more than doubled since we last checked in at the halfway point, and since most designers wait until the very last minute to close the books on their game, we’re expecting a whole lot of entries this year. But that doesn’t mean you should shy away from joining, even if you haven’t started yet — plenty of great games have been made for jams that lasted only a single weekend, let alone an entire week.
There are plenty of tools you can use to make a game quickly. For digital games, there are things 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. 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.
If you want to get involved, head on over to the game jam page on Itch to read the full rules and sign up — then start designing! We’ll be back soon with an update once the jam is over, and then our judging process will begin and we’ll select winners in six categories. A huge thanks to everyone who has already submitted a game, everyone who already has one in the oven cooking up before Friday, and everyone who decides to take this moment right now to dive in. Let’s celebrate the growing public domain together.