In addition to joining the game jam through itch, please fill out the registration form linked above so we can properly award prizes should you or your team win!
Melanated Game Kitchen is a collective of BIPOC game creators focused on the creation and curation of unique interactive experiences revolving around culture while growing in our craft. Their growing collective of artists, designers, programmers, music creators, producers, and more skilled creators can help you take your creative work to the next level.
The Mini-Byte Jam is a monthly prototyping challenge hosted by Melanated Game Kitchen, designed for developers of all skill levels to experiment, build fast, and learn together.
Each jam is a low-stress, high-creativity exercise where you respond to a unique theme using bite-sized challenges, optional constraints, and flavorful “ingredient” prompts to inspire your design and improve your workflow by leveling up your skills.
Ingredients are additional ideas related to the Creative Theme to help focus your creativity.
The jam's main food dish is Layered Lasagna
For our Culture Bytes jams, we always feature a food dish. The food dish connects to our Creative Theme in a way that directly ties the theme to the diaspora. Food connects us together. Explore details about the dish to get inspired for your game and in your own kitchen.
+ Bonus Points to your game if you feature the food dish in your game in a fun way.
You do not need to form a team before the jam starts. During the Kickoff event on October 24th, there will be opportunities to mingle with fellow jammers in the Discord server and form teams then. However, if you do have a team in mind already and want to form ahead of time, that's totally fine!
Unreal Engine is the preferred platform, as we're focused on using and learning the UEFN platform.
This jam is for creators of all relevant skills and experience levels, regardless of whether you have made interactive experiences before or not. Writing, art, design, music/sound design, programming, playtest expertise, etc. There will be mentors in the discord that can help out when you need.
We highly recommend submitting your in-progress game even if you don't finish over the course of the jam, as you can always submit a more complete version later. And we love to learn more about what everyone worked on! We hope to share everyone's progress, regardless of full game completion, during our closing showcase stream.
Location: Discord
Jam Kickoff, Theme Reveal & Team Forming
Location: Discord
Final submissions due!
Location: Discord
Showcase games and live interview sessions with jam teams.
Visit our Game Jam Guide to find even more tools, resources, and free assets. See a sample below as well.
UEFN Tutorials:
UEFN Verse Scripting Playlist - https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRDkUKkyMRU_Kr2yncnDV_HkP-5r07yDW&si=rmrWTka0Sy0UfPdP
UEFN Basics Playlist - https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUtgPAZZ2aY_iFkvdWWfiR9eeynaN9dhb&feature=sha...
