Here at GitHub, we’re no strangers to hosting or sponsoring hackathons. With the growing number of games and game development resources on GitHub, we thought it was about time to throw our very own game jam!

The Challenge

You have the entire month of November to create a web-based game loosely built around one or more of the following themes:

• forking (or forks)
• branching (or branches)
• cloning (or clones)
• pushing
• pulling

What do we mean by loosely based on these concepts? We literally mean, loosely based. Some examples might be a FPS where you throw forks at water balloons, an educational game about DNA cloning, or perhaps a platformer where you push and pull objects.

Your game. Your rules. You can participate as an individual or as a team. You’re encouraged to use open source libraries, frameworks, graphics, and sounds.

Prizes

We have 5 shiny new iPads with Retina displays (64GB wifi models) to give to our winners (or Apple Store Credit equivalent). Runners up will receive GitHub swag of their choice ($100 credit for the GitHub Shop). If you have a team submission, we’ll give you Apple Store credit equal to the value of the iPad. You can split it with your teammates as appropriate.

All of the winners and runners up will be showcased on our blog.

Everyone’s a winner!

All participants will receive a limited edition Coderwall badge as shown above. Winners and runners up will also get their own special version of it.

Judging

We have a number of awesome judges who graciously volunteered to take a look at all the entries!

• David Czarnecki, Lead Engineer at Agora Games
• Eric Preisz, CEO of GarageGames
• Matt Hackett, Co-founder of Lost Decade Games
• Lee Reilly, Gamer Dad and Software Developer at GitHub
• Romana Ramzan, Denki’s Player Champion. PhD Researcher. Organiser of Scottish Game Jam.

Rules

• To qualify for entry as an individual you must fork the github/game-off-2012 repository to your individual account
• To qualify for entry as a team you must fork the github/game-off-2012 to a free organization account
• All entries must be web-based, i.e. playable in a browser. HTML5, WebGL, Unity, Torque 3D, Node JS, Flash are all possible – just be sure the source is made available on your fork.
• You must be over the age of 13

Instructions

• If you don’t already have a GitHub account, sign up now – it’s free!
• Fork the github/game-off-2012 repository to your individual account (or to a free organization account)
• Be sure to follow @github on Twitter for updates
• Make sure your code is pushed to the master branch of your forked repository before Dec 1st!
• Make sure you have a README file that includes a brief description, what open source projects (if any) you used, and a screenshot.
• Your repo should have a brief description and a URL where the game is playable entered into the fields shown below (this will make our judging process easier):

Winners will be announced before Christmas 🎅

Comments / Questions / Help

• New to Git, GitHub, and/or version control? Check out our help documentation to get started!
• Questions about Git/GitHub? Please email support@github.com and be sure to include ‘GitHub Game Off’ in the subject.
• Questions specific to the GitHub Game Off? Please create an issue. That will be the official FAQ.
• The official Twitter hashtag is #ggo12.