The CollabJam 2026 Game Brief (Patreon)

Published:

2026-05-02 16:00:57

Imported:

2026-05

Content

CollabJam2026 starts officially on May 3rd! Below are details on what you are allowed to make for the jam, as well as why these rules have been chosen.

The Brief is that your Game Should be... "Self-Explanatory"!

As well as the regular CollabJam rule that your game cannot be a solo project, the Brief for this year's jam is that you must make a SELF-EXPLANATORY game, which must be WORDLESS. We're not calling this a "theme", because really you can theme your game about whatever you want. But this brief is likely to limit the complexity and types of games you can make.

We want you to make a game where the focus is on the experience of the people who actually play and vote on the games, rather than just as a technical learning project. A game that your fellow devs can genuinely enjoy in the short amount of time they have to play.

We want you to focus on GAME DESIGN, ACCESSIBILITY, SIMPLICITY, and how your game communicates without words. The AUDIOVISUAL elements you often think of as "juice" or "polish" play a large role in making your game intuitive and satisfying to play. We want you to focus on those, so that you'll return to your larger projects with a sense of how important these small details are.

Your game MUST be wordless (or it will be disqualified).

Your game SHOULD be self-explanatory (voters will judge your game on this).

The Key Rules

Your game may not contain any written text either in its interface or game-world.

Your game may not contain any audio recordings of spoken language.

The game may not contain any alphanumeric characters; even for displaying scores, resources, statistics etc.

If your game contains ANY text-based or recorded language it will be DISQUALIFIED from the competition.

(In all of these instances, we use "the game" to refer to all parts of the experience, i.e. menus, tutorials, etc.)

If for some reason you need to create a piece of game world art to represent an object with text, like a "WANTED" poster, newspaper, scribbled note, bottle label, or sign, it should be rendered in squiggles or gibberish (although it would be better to leave it blank to avoid edge-cases).

What About Tutorials?

The only exception to the "wordless" rule is that you may display specific control buttons [e.g. a controller "X" or "Y" button, or the "WASD" keys] as on-screen prompts. You may display control buttons alongside a PICTORAL explanation of what the buttons do.

On the itch.io page for your game, the game description should be a maximum of two sentences describing the game in thematic terms (e.g. who the player character is, what they're trying to do etc.). The game page should not be used to provide an external tutorial or guidance for how to control the game.

This is Too Strict! I Can't Make What I Want!

That's the whole point.

This isn't just a game jam, it's a game design jam.

These rules have been chosen to force you to practice the skills which a lot of developers tend to be weakest at.

The rules are intended to focus you on player-centric game design, as opposed to seeing the game jam purely as a technical exercise.

We want you to make a Self-Explanatory Game; something small, polished, and pleasing to interact with, rather than a tiny broken piece of some larger game you'd like to make.

Not a small, broken prototype for a larger and more ambitious game. Not a dialogue-driven story with a few little interactive bits. A tiny but polished project which is focussed on the interactive audiovisual elements which make or break a commercial project.

Remember: if you like your game, but feel it suffered from the WORDLESS restriction, you can come back and work on it again when the jam is finished.

Examples for Inspiration:

itch.io has a list of games which require no reading (although these may not be intuitive/self-explanatory).

13 Worldless Games with Fully Visual Storytelling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNOZ6l2rINE

Files

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