Game Jam '26

About GDAI

Game Developer Association of India (GDAI) has been dedicated for over a decade to building a thriving ecosystem for game developers and industry professionals. The mission is to foster innovation, sustainability, and excellence in digital game creation by providing resources, mentorship, and skill development. Through industry events and networking, GDAI aims to elevate India's game development industry globally.

GDAI has multiple initiatives to help with Talent development, industry insights and business and networking opportunities, IGDC, Women in Gaming, Game Connect, Incubation to name a few.

Game Connect by GDAI

Game Connect is a transformative initiative to nurture and elevate talent in India’s game development industry. With the sector on the brink of explosive growth, a strong talent pipeline is crucial.

Exclusively for Indian colleges, Game Connect empowers students to run their own game jams, with GDAI providing problem statements, industry jury, and rewards. Participants gain mentorship, hands-on training, networking opportunities, and direct access to jobs and internships—fueling the future of India’s gaming industry.

This initiative is also a part of the pre- event activities that will help identify and mentor individuals and teams to be a part of the GDAI incubator that will be launched across different Colleges and institutions.

The Approach

• Sessions by Industry experts to help people gain insights into video game development
• This will be conducted at road shows as a part of Hack4Bihar Road show

Game Jam

The Game Jam is a “Game Hackathon” where participants get to make a playable game in a limited period of time based on some parameters.

Resources & Guidelines

• The theme/topic will be revealed before the Game Jam. There are no restrictions on Game engine or Assets being used as long as there are no repercussions related to licensing etc.
• Games can be 2D or 3D.
• Team Participation is permitted. Teams can be of 2-4 members.
• You're free to make a game from scratch using any tools of your choice, as long as they don't restrict the sharing or distribution of your published project.
• Final deliverable can be in any executable format, preferred is either an exe for win64 or apk for Android or even browser.
• The platform the game is built for should be secure, generally accessible, and should not require any payment, subscription, purchase of hardware or software, or any kind of additional collection of data for advertising or other purposes.
• You may build and upload the game on itch.io or GitHub for example, but don't upload it to a cloud service that requires users to have an account or subscription in order to download.
• Participants or Participating teams must also prepare a brief presentation or video to go along with the build of the game. This presentation should be an overview of the process that went into creating your game and the learnings from it. Try not to make it too technical, and instead discuss the goals you set for yourself and your experience in their pursuit.
• The presentation should not be too lengthy, i.e. less than 10 slides. In the case of a video, it should be under two minutes.
• The presentation and/or video MUST contain the names of the game and the team, and the link or instructions to access the build of the game from where you have uploaded it.

Other Resources

• Game Engines such as Godot, Unity or Unreal Engine etc make the task of developing games much more straightforward and allow you to focus more on solving design problems.
• However, if you're up for making a game using your own libraries or SDKs, go for it!
• There are many resources available online for acquiring scripts, artwork, models or animations etc. OpenGameArt.org, freesound.org, and Poly have excellent resources. Feel free to use any resources you like, just make sure that you have all the necessary rights to use them and distribute the content made with them.
• For creating artwork and 3D assets, there are plenty of options. For 2D you can use Krita, Gimp, Photoshop etc and for 3D you can use Blender, Maya, Cinema4D etc.

Problem Statement

Problem Statement will be shared by GDAI

Judging

• Scoring will depend on originality of an idea, engaging gameplay and completeness of the app.

Prizes

• The top 3 winners get Certificates from GDAI and an entry tickets to IGDC 2026
• Prize Pool:
  1st Place - Rs.5026/-
  2nd Place - Rs.3026/-
  3rd Place - Rs.2026/-