Global Game Jam is coming at the end of the month. It's a massive jam with tens of thousands of participants making thousands of games in dozen of countries. So, to balance out the hugeness of Global Game Jam, the January Game Jam is all about tiny. This month we'll be making games on a budget, with caps on the amount of scripts, graphics and other resources you can use to make your game. It's about doing more with less, in the spirit of haiku (3 lines, 17 syllables), flash fiction and punk rock (3 chords, 3 minutes).

Here are the constraints:

Analog Games

• Materials: Must have a value of less than $5. This means that every object your game uses must have been purchased or be purchasable for less than $5 dollars total. You can already own it, but subtract its market value from your budget. Also, you can buy things cheaper, used materials if you can find them, but no free things.
• Instructions: No more than 250 words. Game must be playable with only the instructions

Twine Games

• Text: No more than 250 words
• Scripts: No more than 5k total file size

Digital Games

• Scripts: No more than 10k total size of all files, including shaders, and no external libraries
• Graphics: No more than one 256 x 256 px texture (likely as a sprite sheet)
• Audio: No more than 10 seconds total audio, including music and sound effects. Feel free to compose and recombine these clips procedurally at runtime.
• 3D Models: No more than 1000 tris. This pertains only to models built in modeling software. Procedural generation of geometry is ok.

Otherwise, use only what is absolutely necessary by your game engine to have a running game.

For example, in Unity, you can have only:

• 1 material (because you need a material for the texture)
• 1 scene containing:
  
  • 1 game object with only:
    • 1 component added to it (besides transform)

So, that component will be one of your allotted 10k of custom scripts which will serve as the hook into the scene for your code, which will have to instantiate everything manually. So: No Prefabs!

Anything you want a kinematic rigidbody in your scene, you have to add the old fashioned way:

var obj = new GameObject(); obj.AddComponent<BoxCollider>(); var rb = obj.AddComponenp<Rigidbody>(); rb.isKinematic = true;

And you just used 140 of your 10k bytes.

As far as other game engines, please just respect the spirit of the jam and use your judgement about what you use in your project.

This will be a little tricky, but I'm guessing we'll be pretty impressed with what people come up with, as usual. Have fun you guys!