A game jam is typically a 48-hour hackathon for building games based on some theme. Participants—or "jammers"—usually work in teams of two to five people comprised of artists, sound engineers, software developers, students, and/or industry veterans alike. There are hundreds of jams every year, including Ludum Dare, Mozilla's Game On, GitHub's very own Game Off, and more.

The Global Game Jam (GGJ) took place last weekend. Over 10,000 programmers, artists, musicians, and game enthusiasts participated in more than 3,000 game projects, and it looks set to break its own Guinness World Record™ for being the largest game jam in the world. The GGJ had teams participating at 320 locations in 63 countries. In this video Game Jammers from all over the world including this all-star team from Venezuela help explain what the event is like:

There were a few games that caught our eye this year. Play them and fork them below!

EKG Runner

EKG Runner is a game where you literally run for your life, jumping over your heartbeats on the EKG machine created by Ryan Kahn (programming), Kevin Notar (sound), and Creath Carter (art) » play · source

Ryan: I love using GitHub for my projects, primarily open source solutions, because it provides a very easy location for developers to communicate and work together. I find that using GitHub for all my projects gives me access to view my old solutions for the next jam. Plus, getting other people to fork and make requests to fix my game is always nice.

Meat Makes Us Go

Meat Makes Us Go is an abstract physics puzzle game inspired by the mechanics of the human heart brought to you by Al Baker (lead designer and developer) and Tim Knowlton (developer) » play · source

Tim: The Global Game Jam calls for all entries to be released under the CC-BY-NC-SA license, which I think is cool. The code you write for a game jam isn't going to be polished production code anyway, so why not publish it? I suggested GitHub because we needed a way to collaborate and I really enjoy working with git and GitHub. [The] tutorial on hosting web games with GitHub Pages was actually one of the ones I used in publishing Meat Makes Us Go, so thanks for that. I'd been meaning to try Pages.

Monday night, on the very first day of our all-hands winter summit this week, the three millionth person signed up for a GitHub account. That's three million developers building software better, together.

We launched GitHub in April of 2008 and have been off and running ever since. In September of 2011 we celebrated our first million users nearly three and a half years after launch. We marked our second million in August 2012, just short of a year later. This latest batch of one million amazing developers joined GitHub in just the last five months.

I am constantly in awe of the amazing work being done on GitHub. We'll be celebrating the 5 millionth repository being hosted on GitHub any week now. These five million projects are what is enabling software to eat the world.

We would love it if you came to celebrate with us this Thursday at Code Bass in San Francisco. Thank you for all the love and support.

Last month, we challenged you to create a web-based game loosely built around the theme of forking, branching, cloning, pushing, and/or pulling for our very first game jam, the GitHub Game Off. There were over 1337 forks and almost 200 playable games at the end of the competition. Today, we're announcing the winners!

Our panel of expert judges played and rated every game; the five winning entries below received the highest overall marks. We would also like to recognize six runners up and seven honorable mentions. Not only are all these awesome games free and available now for anyone to play, the source code is all publicly available on GitHub. If you're inspired to learn about (or improve your skills with) game development, or even create your own game, just check out the repositories below.

Congratulations to all our winners, and thanks to everyone who took part and made it a success! Special thanks to David Czarnecki, Eric Preisz, Matt Hackett, Romana Ramzan for judging all of the entries, and a nod of appreciation to David Farrell for allowing us to bounce ideas off of him.

The Game Off will be back in 2013!

Winners

Help Hotfix collect stargazers and avoid enemies. Collect commits to upgrade hotfix and add new features » play · source


An abstract racing game where you fight against the clock and the computer to get as far as you can in a product's life-cycle » play · source


Rock Kickass is a shoot'em up platformer about an android who can merge the code of the enemies he kills to gain their powers » play · source


PolyBranch is a minimalist 3D game. Dodging branches may seem easy at first, but how long can you hold up as you approach terminal velocity? » play · source


An addictive game where you guide little Pappu around obstacles while collecting coins, stars, and berries and avoiding enemies known as Pakias » play · source

Runners Up

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Honorable Mentions

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1-up

Did you know: you can continue your GitHub Game Off entries in the Mozilla Game On competition?

You have until February 24th, 2013 to submit games in one of three categories:

• Hackable Games - create games that let players remix game mechanics, fork code, or use assets from the web to create their own version (and maybe even learn how to code along the way).

• Multi-Device Games - use the power of mobile to explore concepts like asymmetric gaming, alternate reality games, and companion apps. This category is searching for games that take advantage of the unique affordances of different platforms they inhabit.

• Web-Only Games - create games that can only be played on the web. Get inspired by web-only mechanics such as sharing links and data, finding clues on the web that will help you advance in the game, always-on multi-player, and more—creating the most webilicious game possible!

Check out the Mozilla Game On website for more details.

The GitHub Game Off is coming to an end. There are almost 1337 forks and a ton of great looking games already. The judges can't wait to dive in!

We've extended the deadline to Dec 1st 12:00 PST. Please be sure you've pushed all your changes and that you've updated the website and description fields for your fork (see the illustration below) before the deadline.

If you're looking for last-minute feedback/testers, try using the Twitter hashtag #ggo12.

Best of luck!

The second annual Octocat Dodgeball Tournament was held on Sunday, November 11, 2012, in San Francisco. Twenty teams joined us for five hours of ball throwing fun, in the process raising $62,000 for four amazing local charities: 826 Valencia, Second Harvest Food Bank, SF Public Libraries, and Streetside Stories.

The World Dodgeball Society even came out to announce and referee the matches; that's WDS president and founder Michael "Handsome" Costanza addressing the crowd.

GitHub's own Force Pushers were able to overcome last year's winners, Heroku's Dodging-Samurai-42, in the semi-finals.

The Force Pushers continued on to defeat the #1 ranked All Thumbs from Thumbtack to win the tournament...

...and most importantly, to bring home the Octotrophy at last!

Every team that participated raised at least $3,000 for our charities, and we'd like to give a special Thank You to New Relic for going above and beyond by donating $5,000!

Thanks to all the fans, friends, and families that came out to cheer!

And finally, a big thanks to all the teams that participated: a16znam Style (Andreessen Horowitz), Angry Nerds and Takoyaki (Atlassian), Sofa Kings (Couchsurfing), Dodging-Samurai-42 (Heroku), The Failovers (Engine Yard), Hi-Ya&ChopChop (Hwa Rang Kwan Martial Arts Center), Look The F Out (Lookout), Data Nerds (New Relic), K.O. Cupids (OKCupid Labs), Obliterate-Y (Perforce), Highballers (Rally.org), Ball And Oates (SoundTracking), Team Rhombus (Square), All Thumbs (Thumbtack), Tribalbrandits (Tribal Brands), and Parliament (Twilio) - we couldn't have done it without you!

Photo credits: Orange Photography, @brianmario, @adelcambre, @newrelic, @bylochacon, @okcupidlabs, @leereilly, @mojombo

We're less than two weeks away from our second annual Octocat Dodgeball Invitational. Last year we raised $57,000 for charities around the world and did some real good in the universe. Well, we also threw a lot of balls at other companies, too.

We even whipped up a special commemorative 2011 memorial video presentation to get you pumped up for this year's dodgefest:

Dodgeball is nothing without you and your team, though! Sign up today, donate, and join us in battle on November 11th at the SoMa Recreation Center. We'll be playing for four amazing local charities: 826 Valencia, Streetside Stories, SF Public Libraries, and Second Harvest Food Bank.

Winners will join Heroku on the magnificent OctoTrophy:

Dodging balls ain't your thing? Still want to join in on the fun? We'll be streaming all the action live to the big screens at Jillian's. Watch the elimination rounds and tournament finals while enjoying a or two on us.

Space is limited at Jillian's, so please register today.

Remember: code is cool and all, but it won't stop a dodgeball. Yet.

We are delighted to announce our first public workshop in Denver, Colorado. Matthew and I on the training team spend most of our time traveling away from Denver to teach the subject we love, so we thought it only made sense to hold a workshop open to the public in our home city. We've also done some work to get the price low enough to drive as much community participation as possible. For $195, you can join us for a day of Git Foundations, which includes:

• The history of Git
• Configuration
• Git's three-stage thinking
• Comparing file differences
• Looking at history
• Moving files
• Branching and merging
• Rebasing
• Collaboration using GitHub

Register here:

Here at GitHub, we're no strangers to hosting or sponsoring hackathons. With the growing number of games and game development resources on GitHub, we thought it was about time to throw our very own game jam!

The Challenge

You have the entire month of November to create a web-based game loosely built around one or more of the following themes:

• forking (or forks)
• branching (or branches)
• cloning (or clones)
• pushing
• pulling

What do we mean by loosely based on these concepts? We literally mean, loosely based. Some examples might be a FPS where you throw forks at water balloons, an educational game about DNA cloning, or perhaps a platformer where you push and pull objects.

Your game. Your rules. You can participate as an individual or as a team. You're encouraged to use open source libraries, frameworks, graphics, and sounds.

Prizes

We have 5 shiny new iPads with Retina displays (64GB wifi models) to give to our winners (or Apple Store Credit equivalent). Runners up will receive GitHub swag of their choice ($100 credit for the GitHub Shop). If you have a team submission, we'll give you Apple Store credit equal to the value of the iPad. You can split it with your teammates as appropriate.

All of the winners and runners up will be showcased on our blog.

Everyone's a winner!

All participants will receive a limited edition Coderwall badge as shown above. Winners and runners up will also get their own special version of it.

Judging

We have a number of awesome judges who graciously volunteered to take a look at all the entries!

• David Czarnecki, Lead Engineer at Agora Games
• Eric Preisz, CEO of GarageGames
• Matt Hackett, Co-founder of Lost Decade Games
• Lee Reilly, Gamer Dad and Software Developer at GitHub
• Romana Ramzan, Denki's Player Champion. PhD Researcher. Organiser of Scottish Game Jam.

Rules

• To qualify for entry as an individual you must fork the github/game-off-2012 repository to your individual account
• To qualify for entry as a team you must fork the github/game-off-2012 to a free organization account
• All entries must be web-based, i.e. playable in a browser. HTML5, WebGL, Unity, Torque 3D, Node JS, Flash are all possible - just be sure the source is made available on your fork.
• You must be over the age of 13

Instructions

• If you don't already have a GitHub account, sign up now - it's free!
• Fork the github/game-off-2012 repository to your individual account (or to a free organization account)
• Be sure to follow @github on Twitter for updates
• Make sure your code is pushed to the master branch of your forked repository before Dec 1st!
• Make sure you have a README file that includes a brief description, what open source projects (if any) you used, and a screenshot.
• Your repo should have a brief description and a URL where the game is playable entered into the fields shown below (this will make our judging process easier):

Winners will be announced before Christmas

Comments / Questions / Help

• New to Git, GitHub, and/or version control? Check out our help documentation to get started!
• Questions about Git/GitHub? Please email support@github.com and be sure to include 'GitHub Game Off' in the subject.
• Questions specific to the GitHub Game Off? Please create an issue. That will be the official FAQ.
• The official Twitter hashtag is #ggo12.

Last year we invited 17 teams to compete on the dodgeball court, all in the name of charity. It was awesome! While Heroku's team did defeat all the competition, the real champions are those who received some of the $57,000 we raised last year!

This year we're going bigger, with more teams and more donations! We've even paired up with the folks from the World Dodgeball Society to help make this year's tournament more awesome than last year!

We have room for 24 teams to compete next month. All you need to compete is 10 to 12 of your strongest co-workers or friends, and a donation of $3,000. Sign up here!

We will all be playing for four amazing local charities:

• 826 Valencia: dedicated to supporting students ages six to eighteen with their writing skills, and to helping teachers inspire their students to write.
• Streetside Stories: cultivates young people's voices to develop literacy and arts skills, fosters educational equity, values diversity, and builds community.
• SF Public Libraries: gives access to information, knowledge, independent learning and the joy of reading.
• Second Harvest Food Bank: mobilizes individuals, companies, and community partners to connect people to the nutritious food they need.

The Facts:

• What: The Second Annual Octocat Dodgeball Invitational
• Where: SoMa Rec Center
• When: Sunday, November 11th from 1:00pm - 6:30pm
  • 1:00 to 1:30 - Sign in and warm up
  • 1:30 to 4:30 - Tournament play
  • 5:00 to 6:00 - Finals
  • 6:00 to 6:30 - Awards ceremony
  • 7:00pm - After-party, details coming soon

Register here: http://dodgeball.github.com/

GitHub is a goldmine of resources for game developers. I'd like to introduce you to five open source projects that'll help you build your first, or next, amazing game. Check them out for your weekend projects, Game Jam entries, or day-to-day projects at work!

Introducing Torque 3D, Spring, Flixel, Three.js, and cocos2D...

Torque 3D

Torque 3D was recently open sourced by Garage Games along with several templates and tutorials to help you build 3D games for the Windows, Mac, Linux, XBOX 360, or Wii platforms. It comes with an impressive world-editing suite, and a ton of other features. It's open source, extremely customizable, and extendable through Torquescript.

If you've used it in the past and/or are interesting in joining the Torque 3D open source steering committee, please take a look at the membership charter (draft).

Flixel

Flixel is a great little library that is free for personal or commercial use and is easy to learn, extend, and customize. It was created by Adam "Atomic" Saltsman and written entirely in ActionScript. It's packed with some amazing features - all well-documented with examples and with source code readily available.

You might recognize one of these games that Adam created - Canabalt (a personal favorite of mine), Mode, Gravity Hook, and Fathom.

Three.js

Three.js is a lightweight 3D JavaScript library which provides renderers for HTML5's canvas, SVG and WebGL. There are some great tutorials, plus in-depth documentation to help get you started.

There are a number of web-based games and demos you can see that use it (fair warning - expect to be lost playing/experimenting with these for the next couple of hours):

• HexGL - a futuristic, fast-paced racing game based on the Wipeout and F-Zero series
• Trigger Rally - a rally racing game
• WebGL Impact - amazing little jetpack demo with box2D and ImpactJS

Spring

Spring is a 3D RTS game engine developed for Windows and Linux with experimental Mac support. It started out with the intention of bringing the gameplay experience of Total Annihilation into 3D. They have some excellent documentation to help you get started.

Cocos2d

The cocos2d frameworks allows you to build 2D games and interactive applications on a number of platforms. Cocos2d-html5 is a 2D game engine written in Javascript, based on Cocos2d-X supporting canvas with WebGL support planned for the future. Cocos2d-iphone will help you create games for iPod Touch, iPhone, iPad, and Mac OS X.

Have you used any of these projects in a school project or Game Jam? We'd love to hear about it - email us at gamebytes@github.com.

Many GitHubbers are parents, so optimizing for happiness means thinking about the entire, extended GitHub family. We work on our own schedule, from anywhere in the world, doing the best work of our lives.

Our work styles means we're able to make more time to play with our kids! It also means we can easily take time to care for them when they're sick, and even swap childcare with coworkers for date nights.

In celebration of our growing GitHub family, we wanted to share a glimpse of some of the youngest 'hubbers... the Octokittens:

On Thursdays we cater lunch in the office and invite our families to join us. It's a cozy experience to regularly share meals and get to know our families and partners. During our biannual summits we include family events, for local and remote Hubbers and families to join in the kid-fueled fray.

Sure, we have other great benefits too, but our efforts to continually optimize for happiness is really what makes it possible for everyone to be so productive.

Welcome to the second edition of Game Bytes, where we highlight some of the latest and greatest game development-related repositories, success stories, and other game-related tidbits.

If I had a nickel for every minute I spent playing David Braben's Frontier - Elite II when I was a kid, I'd probably be a millionaire. Imagine my excitement when I discovered a free, open source game just like it!

Pioneer is an open-ended space exploration game that lets you explore the wonders of the universe by doing something as simple as landing on a planet or space station to burning up while flying between binary star systems. You can make your fortune by engaging in trade, piracy, smuggling, mining, or bounty hunting and then use your riches to buy or customize ships. There are thousands of unique planets and star systems to explore and hundreds of missions to undertake.

Contribute

In addition to the large player community, Pioneer has a very active and extremely welcoming development community. The maintainers encourage you to take a look at the Issues and take care of any low-hanging fruit. No idea where to start? Help is a click away in their IRC channel, #pioneer on Freenode.

Here are some recent contributions:

• fixing a planet's outer rings
• translating the game into Catalan
• adding a new ship
• adding some face-generation assets
• updating an advertisement on a space station to shamelessly promote your company

If you're an up and coming game developer looking to get some valuable experience collaborating with a game project on GitHub or looking to add some impressive work experience to your resume, you might consider helping out in one of these area:

• Engine work i.e. AI, physics, graphics, terrains, etc.
• Mission development (read the guide)
• Models e.g. ships, space stations, cities, etc.
• Music + sound effects
• Artwork e.g. cockpits, identikit faces, etc.
• Story development
• Testing i.e. playing and filing bugs
• Documentation e.g getting started, how to fly, writing missions, etc.

Go forth and play it, fork it, and/or contribute to it! You'll be hard-pressed to find a more welcoming community.

If you have any comments, questions or suggestions for future editions of Game Bytes please email gamebytes@github.com.

The site will be unavailable for a short period this Wednesday (August 15, 2012) starting at 22:00 PDT while we perform a much-needed database upgrade.

During this maintenance, all access to the website and repositories will be disabled. We expect the maintenance will take only a few minutes, but if the maintenance window exceeds 15 minutes, we'll initiate rollback procedures. We'll update this blog post when maintenance is complete.

We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this may cause with the promise that you can look forward to an even faster GitHub once this upgrade is complete.

UPDATE: The maintenance has been completed.

The GitHub Training Team recently caught up with Jake Wharton, legendary Android developer, OSS contributor, and codemonkey at Square. He's a friend of GitHubber Kevin Sawicki, who has used Jake's APIs in the development of our own GitHub and Gaug.es Android apps.

Back in 2011, Jake got started on a work project to manage a large number of virtual machine images from a mobile app. That project never saw the light of day, but while building it, Jake had to code on some UI components he needed to make the app as awesome as he wanted it to be. Happily Jake was able to open-source that code. Unsurprisingly, that very open-sourcing was pivotal to their success.

Action Bar Sherlock

ActionBarSherlock is an Android library for applying the Action Bar UI element—which is available in the Android 3.0 and later—to earlier versions of the OS using the same API as the official Honeycomb API. ActionBarSherlock has been trucking along pretty well, having seen its 4.0 release as of March 2012.

And we here at GitHub do more than say happy things about Jake and his work! GitHub's own Android app uses ActionBarSherlock as does our Gaug.es app. And we're darn happy about it.

View Pager Indicator

The ViewPagerIndicator project is a similar UI component for managing paged displays. The native Android ViewPager widget allows developers to expose UI elements that are too large to fit on a single device screen, but can be paged back and forth with a swipe or other input. Android doesn't natively make it very clear with any visual idiom that this paged model is in use—or which page is currently displayed—so Jake had some more work to do.

Like the best open source APIs, ViewPageIndicator was written to solve a problem the author encountered in the process of solving some other problem, but it soon gained a sizable community and is now being tested and used on many devices at many different screen sizes and resolutions.

Open Source FTW

Jake talked to us about how his kind of code is particularly well-suited to an open source model. UI enhancements, he explained, are a big time sink for one developer—it's just really hard code to get right—and it offers very little individual benefit in comparison to the effort expended. Having a uniform ActionBar implementation or a properly visualized ViewPager "just gets you up to the 'looks like everyone else' level--and there's no fun in that." No fun indeed, if you're doing it all alone.

A solitary developer is unlikely to make that kind of investment, especially in the Android space where an effective UI component has to be tested on a massive number of devices and screen sizes that no one but the largest development shops is going to have all in once place. But Jake wasn't alone. He had a lot of help.

These two projects together tell the canonical open-source success story: one talented developer scratches his own itch, then provides a little bit of project leadership while a large community of others contribute hundreds or thousands of additional hours of improvement. The result is a UI component usable by any Android dev without duplicating the effort of building the component, allowing that dev to concentrate on how he or she can build a more awesome app that serves its users better than it otherwise would have. And this is what writing software is all about.

Our hats are off to you, Jake! Thanks for your contributions, and thanks for hosting them on GitHub.

We hosted our first OctoGala here in San Francisco at Brick and Mortar. Not only did we have a night of glitz and glamor, but we were able to raise $7,000 for Running Chicken!

The funds raised at the OctoGala will bring security to two core Running Chicken programs based near Kisumu, Kenya: a home and resource center for vulnerable children and a school-based feeding program. The children’s home currently houses 14 full time residents and is also open to kids in the community to visit for assistance. Monthly operating expenses include rent, utilities, food and cooking supplies, medical care and supplies, and educational fees and supplies (including school uniforms and shoes). Additional funds will ensure that we are better prepared to not only support the full time residents at our facility but also to serve other vulnerable children in the community who come to the children’s home for help. Additional funding will help maintain our library and will enable us to provide new sports equipment and art supplies – important resources for our residents that we aren’t always able to provide.

The school-based feeding program guarantees students – many of whom walk a long way to and from school - at least one nutritious meal every day (even during weekends and holidays). Funds raised at the OctoGala will support our efforts to strengthen the infrastructure of this critical program and will also allow us to serve community members that sometimes turn to the school for emergency meals.

With OctoGala funds, Running Chicken will also be able to launch and pilot a greenhouse farming project. Start-up costs often prevent good ideas with revenue generating potential from being implemented in the community we work with. This project represents a promising intervention that provides immediate return in the form of sustenance for the children’s home and school-based feeding program, and also presents the opportunity to generate sustainable revenues for these programs.

Check out the Glamtocats in action! If you want to see more pictures, just go to our online gallery.

We'll see you at the next one!