GitHub’s 2025 game jam sets WAVES theme and Dec 1 deadline

Developers enter a busy season this November as GitHub revives its community tradition with the thirteenth edition of its month long game jam under the theme WAVES, an open brief that has drawn participants since 2012 to GitHub Game Off. The jam runs through December 1, 2025 at 13:37 PST, with a relaxed, creativity first approach.

Participants can interpret WAVES literally, digitally, or emotionally, and the jam even suggests asking GitHub Copilot for brainstorming prompts. You can work solo or with a team in any language, engine, or library, a wide berth that keeps GitHub Game Off accessible to newcomers and veterans alike. Guidelines stay intentionally light by asking entrants to keep it creative, respectful, and fun, and to push code before the deadline.

After submissions close, entries are peer reviewed across multiple categories. Voting wraps on January 8, 2026 at 13:37 PST and winners will be named on the GitHub Blog and social channels on January 10, 2026 at 13:37 PST, a cadence that reinforces the community led ethos of GitHub Game Off.

The organizers underline that no expertise is required, noting that many participants ship a first game during the jam, some rely on popular engines, others write their own, and a few even target classic hardware like the NES, Game Boy, or ZX Spectrum. With a Game Off 2025 Community, a community run Discord, and signup on itch.io, GitHub Game Off offers a low barrier entry to version control and collaborative workflows.

While the jam centers on play, it also funnels newcomers into the company’s expanding AI toolchain that covers generative AI, LLM fundamentals, retrieval augmented generation, and Copilot driven code generation. Framed as part of the world’s leading AI powered developer platform, and with Gartner positioning GitHub as a Leader for the second year in a row, GitHub Game Off doubles as an on ramp to the ecosystem.

For enterprises watching the developer tools market, a month long jam may look like a curiosity, yet it operationalizes the practices that matter in production such as versioning, pull requests, CI and CD, and integrating security early in the software development lifecycle to shift security left. By inviting thousands to practice these habits in public, GitHub Game Off functions as a low cost adoption engine that reinforces network effects around the core platform.

For the UK startup ecosystem and founders globally navigating cautious investment cycles, open community challenges create discovery moments for talent and prototypes without the overhead of formal programs. By compressing ideation and collaboration into a single month, GitHub Game Off becomes a pragmatic way to spot contributors, test remote workflows, and evaluate toolchains before capital is committed.

Last year delivered scale with Game Off 2024 surpassing 500 submissions, a signal that the format continues to attract a broad range of makers who return for fresh themes and peer voting, and that momentum sets expectations high for a new flood of WAVES inspired experiments that will move from ideas to playable builds in just four weeks. As enterprises look to automate more of their documentation, training, and interactive marketing through code native workflows, GitHub Game Off hints at a future in which AI assistance turns developer communities into always on studios for enterprise content.