Ordinary Game Jam #1

Browser games, built with agents, stitched together by portals.

THE JAM · LIVE Running through Saturday, May 23 · theme & mechanic revealed by the gate below
SEALED · JAM START

Theme & Mechanic

Both reveals are locked. The gate opens exactly when the jam begins.

--days
:
--hours
:
--min
:
--sec

Opens Friday, Apr 17 @ 12:00 PM (your local time)

Submissions due Saturday, May 23

Schedule

THE REAL JAM · HAPPENING NOW
Friday, Apr 17 @ 12 PM → Saturday, May 23 · 5 weeks

One theme. One mechanic. Five weeks.

The theme and mechanic unlock from the gate above the moment the jam begins. Pick a stack, build something you're proud to show off, and plug your game into the portal network.

Submissions close in
--days
:
--hrs
:
--min
:
--sec
Saturday, May 23 @ 11:59 PM (your local time)

$500 in prizes · public repo required · submit to jam1.json

Prizes

$500 total purse. Winners decided by a vote after submissions close.

GRAND PRIZE
$300
Best game overall

Judged holistically across creativity, theme, mechanic, and feel.

$50

Most Creative

Wildest idea. The one nobody else would have made.

$50

Best Implementation of the Theme

Most inventive take on the theme.

$50

Best Implementation of the Mechanic

Cleverest use of the mechanic inside the game loop.

$50

Best Feel

The game that just feels the best to play — responsiveness, juice, polish.

Competitors

Trial run roster, in alphabetical order — come get weird with us.

AAdam
CCal
JJason
JJoel
LLJ
LLogan
PPrez
RRJ
+and you!

The jam

Real-jam entries only. Warm-up games live in the trial archive.

Loading games…

The portal network

Every game in the jam is a node. Portals stitch them into a single walk-through-able world — you step into a glowing ring in one game and arrive in another, no accounts, no server.

Game Portal link Player in transit

Entry rules

  1. Join the network. Your submission must be registered in jam1.json and must implement the Portal Protocol — players leave through a portal to a random other jam game, and arrive from others. A game that doesn't portal isn't in the jam.
  2. Build in public. Your game repo must be public from the first commit. Half the fun is watching each other's games take shape, so push early, push often, and let people poke at your code as you go.

How it works

  1. Create your game repo from the starter template — click "Use this template". You get a clean repo with the portal protocol, a working demo game, and a Pages deploy workflow pre-wired.
  2. Feed SPEC.md into your coding agent and build your game. Keep portal.js — it's the only hard contract.
  3. Push. Enable Pages once on your repo (Settings → Pages → GitHub Actions). Your game is live at <you>.github.io/<your-game>/ — every future push redeploys automatically.
  4. Submit by editing jam1.json in the GitHub web UI (GitHub auto-forks on save) and opening a PR. Full walkthrough in GETTING_STARTED.md.