Ordinary Game Jam #1

A browser game jam where every entry is stitched together by portals. Players travel from one game to the next without leaving their browser.

• Live showcase: https://callumhyoung.github.io/gamejam/
• Starter template: https://github.com/CallumHYoung/gamejam-starter

This repo is the registry, build spec, and showcase website. It is not where games live — each participant hosts their own game in their own repo created from the starter template, and submits a PR here adding themselves to games.json.

Schedule

Trial run — now → Saturday, Apr 18 @ 9 PM. Warm-up only. Do not build your real game yet. Use this time to get the starter template working, get comfortable building with Claude, mess around, and have fun. Submit something silly.

The real jam — Sunday, Apr 19 → Sunday, May 10. Three weeks. The theme and mechanic will both be revealed when the jam starts. Plan your approach after you see them.

Competitors (trial run): Adam · Cal · Jason · Joel · Prez · RJ · and you!

Participating

→ Start here: GETTING_STARTED.md — the full template-to-PR walkthrough.

The short version:

1. Go to the starter template and click "Use this template" to create your own game repo.
2. Clone your new repo, feed SPEC.md into your coding agent, build your game.
3. Push — the included workflow auto-deploys to https://<you>.github.io/<your-game>/.
4. Edit games.json in the GitHub web UI (GitHub auto-forks on save), add your entry, open a PR.
5. Iterating on your game afterwards is push-only — no new PR needed unless your games.json entry or thumbnail changes.

Running the showcase site locally

It's a static site. Any static server works:

cd gamejam
python -m http.server 8000
# then open http://localhost:8000

Files

• index.html, style.css, app.js, fx.js — the showcase site
• games.json — the registry every game fetches to pick portal destinations
• SPEC.md — the build spec and portal protocol (the thing friends paste into their agent)
• GETTING_STARTED.md — fork-to-PR walkthrough for participants
• thumbnails/ — game card images
• games/ — each participant's game lives under games/<id>/ on their own fork