WELCOME to the CGDC's Speedgame Challenge 2025

SPEEDGAME: HARDMODE!

The Speedgame: Hardmode is the Christian Game Developers Conference's game jam that adopts a short term format and focuses on pushing your game development and organizational skills. You have three days to create a game based off of a community voted theme. Whether it has a spiritual teaching or not is totally up to you. One thing is for sure, this format is going to help level you up!

THEME :

 Hope in the Darkness

TIMELINE

• May 23rd 7pm PDT / 10pm EDT, Reveal winning theme and start the challenge
• May 26th - 7pm PDT / 10pm EDT, Jam ends and voting starts.
• May 30th - Reveal Winners

VOTING CATEGORIES

• Best Overall
• Most Fun
  
• Best Graphics
• Best Audio (How good or effective is the sound)
• Best Mood (Storytelling, emotion, and vibe)

RULES

• Give yourself enough time to upload your entry. Perhaps upload early, even if it's an incomplete build, then work on iterating and improving your project. After the deadline on the final day, you have ONE additional hour to submit patches, bug fixes, or edits of any kind. NO UPDATES should be submitted after that extra hour, any abusers will be penalized! Please check your timezone to make sure you submit on time.

• Teams must not be greater than three people.

• All games must be created during the course of the challenge, not before.

• It is encouraged that games be made open source at the end of the challenge to allow other developers to see the underpinnings of your projects. This way we foster an open community that builds each other up by sharing resources. If certain licenses of libraries or tools do not permit you to make them open source, then omit these. NOTE: This only applies to the challenge game, not to any later revisions or iterations that you make to your game, in case you decide to continue work on the game, for example.

• Some criteria must be met:
  • Games must not contain any extremes of the following: violence, sexual content, occult practices, or language. Use restraint.
  • Games must not breach any copyright laws. No plagiarism or taking other’s work as your own!

• Any tools or libraries you can leverage for this challenge can be used.

• You can reuse any libraries you may have previously created such as graphic, keyboard, or sound routines. Regarding libraries in general, if any are necessary to play your game, please add them as part of the zip or installation file so others do not have to go hunting down ways to play your game. This refers to programmed libraries, not image or audio assets.

• 3rd party Artwork/Music/Audio assets will require a field to be marked during submission of your game.
  • Credit where you sourced your resources from.
  • In an effort to provide some fairness in terms of judging the graphics and audio of a submitted game, we'd like to help people understand where a pre-made asset pack or audio pack was used compared to someone who put the effort in themselves to create everything from scratch.

• Please make your games playable in any of the following environments: Windows 7/8/10, Mac/Linux, Web

• Games must include instructions on how to play your game such as controls and how the game works. A quick readme file, or in-game tutorial outlining the controls and general background information would be useful!

RULES REGARDING AI USE

• Tab completing code (this is similar to IDE auto-complete, snippets, and find/replace for name changes) is allowed.

• Asking questions about code for debugging or finding a way forward while consulting ChatGPT or other AI is allowed. (this is similar to using Google searches, game engine documentation, and Stack Overflow)

• If you vibe-coded your way through the challenge, you will need to mark the field that asks this during your game submission.
  • This is telling the AI what you need it to do and it does it for you, rather than you asking a question on how to do something and then doing it yourself. So, just be honest with yourself when submitting your game.

• If any audio or image generation tool was used for this game (including presentation material for the itch.io page) you will need to mark the appropriate field during your game submission.
  • If you use the AI generator to give you audio or image that you will then turn into something new and different, you do not need to mark the field during submission. This is the difference between creating an image and just throwing a texture on it and changing the colors, to creating an image and then doing enough altering that the original is no longer apparent. Likewise with audio, if you alter the original enough that it no longer sounds like what was produced, you won't need to mark the field.
  • Be creative and put some effort into your work!

SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS

Itch.io will be used for all game submissions. Please put your project and all necessary files inside a zip and upload to your project page. Change the pricing to "No payments" and mark release status as released when finished making changes. All other necessary information can be filled as you see fit.

Once your project page is complete, go back to the jam page and submit your project!