We are entering GBJam 14

GBJam 14 runs from 11 to 21 September. We are entering it.

What the jam asks for

GBJam is about making games inspired by the Game Boy, and it is strict about what that means:

• 160 by 144 pixels. You can scale the viewport, but the aspect ratio and the square pixels stay.
• Four colours. A maximum of four on screen at any one time.
• Game Boy controls. A D-pad, A, B, select and start. They can be bound to whatever keys you like, but that is the whole input budget.
• Everything made during the jam. Music, code and art, all of it, by you and your team inside the ten days. Fonts are the one exception.
• No AI tools. No AI art, no AI code generation. The jam is explicit about this and the reasoning is on the rules page.

There are two themes. One is "Game Boy" and applies to everyone. The second is announced on the first morning, which means no amount of preparation this week will help with it.

Why now

This is a refresher more than a campaign. Three years of not shipping a small game leaves rust in specific places: the tooling has moved, the engine has moved, and a lot of the muscle memory for scoping something down to ten days has gone with it. A jam is the cheapest way to find all of that out at once.

So the plan is deliberately unambitious. Experiment, catch up, and finish something. A finished small thing beats an interesting unfinished thing, and ten days is not enough time to be clever about it.

The last one

We entered GBJam 11 in 2023 with Relics of the Space, our Game Boy dungeon crawler. It placed 20th of 390 entries for Gameboy Soul, which is the top 5% and the category the jam exists to judge. It also placed 89th for gameplay, which is the more useful number of the two: the game looked the part long before it played well.

The rating categories have shifted since then. This year they are gameplay, graphics, soundtrack and SFX, Gameboy Soul, secondary theme interpretation, and quirkiness, which is new. Quirkiness is the one worth aiming at. It is the only category that rewards an idea rather than execution, and ideas are cheap in a way that art and audio are not when you have ten days.

Submissions open on the 11th. We will write up what happens, ideally before 2034, and it should read better than the last jam we wrote up.