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Has this ever happened to you?

"Ah," you say, in black and white for some reason.  "It's time to watch Games Done Quick.  But only for, like, five minutes."

"Oh, fiddlesticks!" you exclaim as you pour popcorn all over yourself.  "It's been five days, and I haven't done anything else!  If only there were a better way!"

Hi.  I'm Eevee, and I'm here to tell you that there is a better way.  Instead of watching people play video games all week like some kind of huge nerd, you could also make a video game at the same time, like some kind of gigantic nerd.  A giganerd.

The Deal

Make a video game during SGDQ!  You have from the moment it starts until 24 hours after it ends, according to the GDQ schedule.  (If it runs late, which it absolutely will, I'll update the end time.)

No judging, no rules, no pressure.  Start a new thing from scratch, work on an existing thing, mod someone else's thing, take a thing off the backburner, or just goof off with an engine you've never used before.  Work alone, work with a friend, work with a lot of friends, work with an entire game studio.

FAQ

Q: Can I—
A: Yes.

Q: Is there a theme?
A: No.  But if you're at a loss for ideas, I heartily encourage something ironically appropriate, like "difficult to speedrun" or "takes longer to beat than it took to make" or "save the animals".  Or try this theme generator!

Q: Prepriculous.  I know nothing of the craft of video game making.
A: You fool.  You utter buffoon.  Anyone can video game make.

Video game make help

If you've never made a game, this is an excellent time to start!  There's only a week and everyone will be spending most of their time watching Sonic go faster than usual or whatever, so most of the entries will be half-finished prototypes.

Here are some things that are relatively quick and easy to get into and also don't require a lot of art investment:

bitsy is a microscopic game engine for making little worlds where you can walk around and talk to people.  It's actually hard to do much more than that (though a few people have managed).  I made Roguelike Simulator in a day with bitsy!

Twine is a system for writing nonlinear stories.  Doesn't sound game-ish enough?  With some clever use of the Harlowe 2 story format, you can track progress and add an inventory and probably even rig up combat or something.

Inform 7 is an entire programming language designed specifically for writing old-school text adventures — the ones with no pictures where you have to type GET YE FLASK and whatever.  It gets pretty deep, but since half the fun is in the writing, a week is plenty of time to make a charming little world with a few rooms and a few things you can interact with.

Doom is, you know, Doom???  The first video games ever made?????  It turns out you can make your own maps for Doom, and walking around a world that you built from scratch as John Doommans is pretty rewarding!  I wrote a whole series on how to do this a couple years ago.

MegaZeux is, I admit, getting kind of obscure, but I will give you a thousand bonus points if you actually make something with it.  It's a DOS-era tile-based game engine with a bunch of built-in stuff, so you can treat it like a level editor if you want — but it's also pretty easy to dip your toes into adding custom behavior.

There are plenty more depending on what you're after; maybe ask in the Discord?

And if you do want some art, might I suggest using my crowdsourced potluck tileset, which I promised to make a game with and then never got around to?  You could succeed where I failed!