Zaephus Engine Jam

Ratings

This jam is now over. It ran from 2025-06-08 10:00:00 to 2025-06-16 07:00:00. View results

Up for a challenge? Looking to improve your programming skills? Want to help a game development student test his graduation project? If you've answered yes to any of these, you're in the right place! In this game jam you will be challenged to make a game prototype in the Zaephus Engine.

The Zaephus Engine is a game engine project I started over a year ago and am currently working on as a graduation project at HKU (University of the Arts Utrecht). The engine is built in C++ with OpenGL. It has no editor, so it is more like a game framework like Bevy, RayLib or Löve2D.

This jam is a great opportunity for me to test the design of the Zaephus Engine and to test its performance in different scenarios and on different systems. I am looking to test these areas:

Ease of Use: How straightforward was it to use the available systems?
Documentation: Were the systems used documented fully, was that documentation easy to understand and were they helpful?
Missing Features: What features or systems were missing, or not complete enough to be able to achieve the desired effect? If workarounds were needed, how impactful were they?
Performance and compatibility: How well does the engine perform across different games and on different systems?

If there are any issues, questions, bugs or recommendations, please do not hesitate to share those here on the community board or on the jam discord!

A Gamer's Dozen

The theme for this jam is: A Gamer's Dozen. The Zaephus Engine is purpose built to allow its users to create games containing large amounts of enemies, solders, monsters or any other kind of unit. Not tens, hundreds or thousands, more like ten or a hundred times that. Think of tower defense games, strategy games, bullet hells or whatever else you can think of. Whatever you choose to make, more is always better!

Rules

You have to use the Zaephus Engine for your game. Files, templates and documentation for the engine will be provided at the start of the jam. Using any other engine would defeat the purpose of this jam :)
Keep your game safe for work. Gore is allowed however (if you figure out how to achieve that in the engine).
You can use any assets that are pre-made, publicly available, or paid for. As long as you have the legal right to use said assets.
You can not start working on your game before the jam starts. Mostly because the engine will not be made available until then :)
Besides submitting the game itself, please also submit the source code for your game. This will be very helpful in analyzing all shortcomings and issues with the engine.

Rating

Entries in this game jam will be rated on four different criteria:

Fun-ness: How enjoyable was the game? Did you wish there was more?
Originality: Have we seen this game before, or is it novel and refreshing to play?
Creativity: How well does this game cope with the engines limitation?
Amount of Units: The theme of the jam! How many units did this game manage to cram in? (This criteria will be manually ranked by the host)

Engine Files

Crucial for actually creating a game in a game engine, the game engines files! All these files can now be found on its on Zaephus Engine Itch page. This page contains the engine source code, a project template useable in at least CLion and Visual studio. It also contains a number of executables for the engines examples and most importantly it contains the documentation for the engine.

These files are subject to change as issues are found during the jam, so do keep an eye on the engines itch page for any changes that have been made.

Limitations

As this engine is built by only one person it is not feature complete. Part of the challenge for this game jam is having to work with what you do have and to work around possible limitations. Below are a couple limitations that the engine currently has (do note that this can change closer to the start of the jam):