UPDATE: Jam extended 3 days! Holiday livestream playing submissions on hardware starts when jam ends!

What's the GameTank Game Jam?

It's a jam to make games for the GameTank!

...What's a GameTank?

The GameTank is an 8-bit console! As in actual physical hardware with an 8-bit CPU and analog video out!

https://gametank.zone/

• Similar graphical specs to the Pico-8, 128x128* resolution
• Twice the clock speed of an NES, and 16 times as much work RAM
• Framebuffer graphics + speedy blitter engine
• Open source hardware and toolchains on github
  
• Available in kit form, soon in premade form, or download PCB files, or play the emulator!

How do I jam for the GameTank!?

You can write games in assembly, or in C, or we even have somebody working on a Rust toolchain. A C SDK is available to use with the cc65 compiler. Or if you have some other wacky way that you already write code for 6502-based platforms make something in that! On the wiki you can find deep technical descriptions of the hardware and register addresses, and there's even a few video tutorials on GameTank assembly programming on YouTube.

Once you have built a ROM file, typically with the extension *.gtr, make a page on Itch.io with screenshots, the rom file, and an embeddable emulator you can bundle your rom file into with this handy web-based packaging tool I just made.

There's also a discord channel you can join to get help, answers, ideas, or even just say hi!

Is there a theme? What are the rules?

Keeping the first jam open ended, the only theme is "Make something for the GameTank!" Submissions should be able to at least run on the emulator but I'll also test your submissions on real hardware both during the "judging" period and during the week of the jam on request.

Source sharing is not required, but highly encouraged :)