Step right up! This year’s Fantastic Arcade Gamemaking Frenzy has officially begun! From now until Sunday, November 12th, at 11:59pm CST we are calling on developers from around the world to participate in our two-week game jam, Phony Island!

We are inviting you to create your best 2-player microgames in the style of alllllmost copyright-infringing carnival games, that juuuust manage to stay on the right side of the law (above photo credit).

TO ENTER THE JAM:

– Your game must be a head-to-head simultaneous two-player game. Your game must run on Windows (sorry!) and use WASD + SPACE for player one and ARROW-KEYS + ENTER for player two as input in order to be considered for inclusion in the Phony Island “cabinet.”

– It must have a short duration, 30 seconds or less, resulting in a WIN or LOSE for each player. (We’ll be keeping score offstage.).

– After the match is over the game must QUIT AUTOMATICALLY.

– Your jam must reference this year’s secret ingredient.

THIS YEAR’S SECRET INGREDIENT IS:

🎟🎟🎟​🎟​🎟🎟​🎟🎟​THE TICKET🎟🎟🎟🎟🎟🎟🎟🎟

Before ending your game, please award the winning player with an arbitrary number of tickets, which we will tally during our playthrough on November 19th. The player with the most amount of tickets will redeem them for a fabulous prize!

All of the submitted games will be compiled into a custom launcher and run as part of a live game-show-like event on the final night of this year’s Fantastic Arcade, at the festival’s new home: Alamo Drafthouse’s boardwalk carnival-esque bar, the Barrel O Fun.

From now until Sunday, November 12th, at 11:59pm CST you can submit your game at itch.io’s #phonyisland jam site. We look forward to seeing your game!

Attention all developers: clear off your calendars from June 16th to June 30th now, because JUEGOS RANCHEROS is proud to announce The Mystic Western Game Jam, a spiritual sequel to our 2014 Space Cowboy Game Jam.

The game jam, hosted with the help of itch.io, is open to all developers worldwide, and will run for two weeks, after which entries will be judged by players for the week following, on a variety of to be determined criteria like truth, vastness, benevolence and psychedelia.

And, as with the Space Cowboy Game Jam before it, JUEGOS RANCHEROS is partnering with the Marfa Film Festival to exhibit a selection of the games in the real-live mystical West Texas desert. The games will be on display July 13th through July 17th, alongside the festival’s film & video works, free and open to both festival attendees and the general public.

You can find more detailed information at the official Mystic Western Game Jam site, and then begin to submit your games starting on June 16th. In the meantime, you can start dreaming up big star-gazing, truth-seeking & self-reflecting ideas, and discussing collaborations on twitter via the hashtag #mysticwestern. We’re all looking forward to seeing what you create!

If you thought the Adventure Time Game Jam was going to be hard to top, we might just have done it: organizers of Fantastic Arcade have just announced the Barfcade Game Jam, a two-week jam open to developers world wide to create a ton of two-player head-to-head games based on food, cooking, eating and (obviously) barfing.

Why barf and why now? Fantastic Arcade’s special guest this year will be Thu Tran, frequent Babycastles collaborator and creator of the super amazing cooking/puppet show Food Party (above) and its MTV2 followup Late Night Munchies.

Thu will be providing the special secret ingredient required in all the jam games, which will be announced just before the jam begins on Saturday, August 30th, and will be co-hosting the Barfcade proper, a live game-show event held on September 21st that will be streamed for the rest of the world to see on Venus Patrol’s Twitch channel.

Games for the jam are meant to be fast, competitive, and no longer than 30 seconds each — the best of these will be strung together for the Barfcade event, giving the live competition a sort of head-to-head WarioWare vibe. Canabalt creator Adam Saltsman has created a brand new example game (pictured above), which you can play at the Barfcade website to get a sense of where to head!

The jam will run Saturday, August 30th through Sunday, September 14th — more details are available at the Barfcade site, which will be where you can also find the secret ingredient at launch. Can’t wait to see what you come up with!

Doing anything particularly romantic between May 24th and June 8th? No? Good, because I’m super happy to announce that Venus Patrol is organizing the first in what I hope becomes a regular series of game jams, this time dedicated to the lonesome future west-world theme: the space cowboy.

The game jam, hosted with the help of itch.io, is open to developers worldwide, and will run for two weeks, after which it will be judged by players for the week following on a variety of to be determined criteria like romance and psychedelia.

The idea for the jam came, obviously, after I finally got it together to watch all of Cowboy Bebop in one crazy week-long marathon (which I suggest you do or re-do in advance) and realized no game had quite struck that perfect tone the series did — an ineffable feeling I also get from Cory Mcabee’s film The American Astronaut and Lisa Hanawalt’s web-comic Coyote Doggirl.

And hopefully you’ll find that feeling just as evocative and inspiring, because just as exciting as the jam itself is news that our Austin indie collective JUEGOS RANCHEROS will be showcasing the best of the games from July 2nd through the 6th in the real-life mystical West Texas high desert town of Marfa, as part of the Marfa Film Festival.

A few of us just got back from Marfa late last night, where we met with Film Festival organizers & location-scouted the area we’ll be carving out and dedicating to your Space Cowboy games, and there’s a whole lot of expectation from all parties involved that This Is Going To Be Really Cool for the thousands of people that attend the Fest.

We’ll be putting out more detailed information at the official Space Cowboy Game Jam site and open up for your submissions on the 24th of this month, but in the meantime start clearing off your calendar, dreaming up big ideas under an endless starry sky & discussing collaborations on twitter via the hashtag #spacecowboygamejam — we’re all crazy excited to see what you come up with!