What is IGC CollabJam?
Indie Game Clinic hosts CollabJam to encourage game developers to try working together. This could mean you;
It's two weeks long, because this is more inclusive to people with busy lives, workloads, family responsibilities, disabilities or school/college. The longer window of time also means that team members can negotiate between themselves how much of the time to use.
Maybe you all agree to work for an hour a day. Maybe some folks get involved just in the second week. Maybe you decide to cram it all into 2 day sprints. It's all up to you.
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).
Here's a top-level explanation in video form, but you should read below for more details:
The Key Rules
(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).
Voting Criteria
After the jam ends, all participants from every team will be able to vote on others' games. It's not essential that your game be playable in browser, but it's advised if you care about potentially winning, as this will increase the amount of people who are able to access your game and vote for it. These are the statements voters will be asked to think about when comparing games to decide which 3 teams win the Patreon membership prizes:
The voting criteria are worded to be deliberately subjective and to focus on how much your players actually enjoyed and admired what they played. This is try to help teams focus on the end-user experience of players, rather than treating their projects purely as technical learning projects. Under these criteria, the projects which score more highly will tend to be smaller in scope but with more polish.
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. The game page can include credits [although you will also be asked for these when submitting the game to the jam].
What About Credits/Menu Options/Title Screens
There is a space for you to add credits when your game is submitted as a jam entry.
Your game page on itch.io will show the game's title. You shouldn't have a title in the game, and the game itself doesn't need a "title screen"; If you want to add one after the jam and voting is finished, that's totally up to you!
Most menu options can be facilitated using sliders and/or icons. It is rare for a game of this scope to require complex settings like control remappings and different resolutions, so either avoid these or find a unique way to icon-ify them, if you have time.
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.
itch.io has a list of games which require no reading (although these may not be intuitive/self-explanatory).
Use of A.I. and Other Assets
A lot of the hype around gen-AI is centered on a desire to be an "ideas guy" who gains the benefit of others' skills without having to hire people or compromise with them during collaboration. The use of gen-AI in an entry of this jam would be against the spirit of the jam, which is intended to give you experience of working with other people, using your skills to see what you (plural) can make together. However, if your programmer knows what they're doing and has managed to use AI tools without degrading their own skills or creating a codebase they don't actually understand, then we are not going to police this. The primary learning goal of the jam is to promote collaboration, and to produce some interesting and intuitive smalls videogame - not to judge participants' technical skills.
Last Year's Games...
Some examples of games from the 2025 Jam are in the video below. The theme was "You Are Not The Main Character". They might give you a sense of what teams of 2 or 3 people might reasonably achieve in a two week jam,
Prize Categories:
Team members for the top 3 voted games will receive year-long subscriptions to the Indie Game Clinic Patreon. Those of you who are already members can use these to top up your existing memberships, or can give them away to friends and family or as a prize/promotion for your own projects.
3rd Place - 🟢 Green Tier memberships for up to 4 team-mates [Discord Access, Early Ad-Free Videos]
2nd Place - 🔵 Blue Tier memberships for up to 4 team-mates [Green Tier rewards plus BTS notes from the Game Developers' Library]
1st Place - 🟣 Purple Tier memberships for up to 4 team-mates; all previous Tier rewards, plus early scripts for IGC design video essays.
All entrants are encouraged to vote on each-other's games in a random queue, and the judging criteria are deliberately worded to be subjective, i.e. "I liked X" rather than "this game has the best X".
Games will be disqualified if:
How To Collaborate?
Some helpful videos on how to manage collaborative projects can be found here. I'll add more as more relevant examples occur to me:
