The pitch
We play every entry. No voting.
Eclipse Publishing and Game Studios is putting up $500 and reading every single submission. There's no community voting here — no rating rings, no popularity contests, no advantage for whoever has the biggest Twitter following. Our team plays every entry and picks the winners.
We're a small indie publisher and studio, which means we're not looking for polish or scope. We're looking for the one mechanic that made us sit up. The idea that shouldn't work and does. The prototype that's rough as hell but obviously alive.
The schedule
Submissions open
Thursday, October 1
01:00 PM EDT
Deadline
Monday, October 5
01:00 PM EDT
Winners announced
Saturday, October 10
12:00 PM EDT
96 hours. Theme drops when submissions open. Any engine, any team size, any genre.
Not in Eastern? That's 05:00 PM UTC when submissions open.
The prizes
Five hundred dollars, four criteria.
1st
$300
2nd
$150
3rd
$50
How judging works
Eclipse plays and scores every entry. Four criteria, weighted equally.
Scope is not a category. A tight five-minute game beats a broken thirty-minute one every time.
Between the deadline and October 10, we're playing. Winners are announced on the jam page and across Eclipse's channels.
What winning actually gets you
Cash, a feature on Eclipse's channels, and a standing offer to pitch us the full version. No obligation, no strings. You keep everything.
Content rules
The short version of the official rules on the itch.io jam page.
Ownership and rights
- ✦You keep 100% ownership of your game. Entering grants Eclipse nothing except permission to show footage, screenshots, and your game's name in jam coverage, recap videos, and social posts.
- ✦Eclipse claims no publishing rights, no right of first refusal, and no equity. If we want to publish your game, we'll ask like anyone else.
Eligibility
- ✦Open worldwide. Entrants under 18 need a parent or guardian to claim any prize.
- ✦Prizes paid via PayPal or bank transfer. If we can't legally send money to your country, we'll tell you before the deadline, not after you win.
- ✦Eclipse employees, contractors, and judges can't win. They can participate for fun.
Your submission must be
- ✦Started after the theme announcement at 1:00 PM ET on October 1. Pre-existing projects, reskins of old work, and "I had this lying around" entries are disqualified. Engine boilerplate, your own reusable code libraries, and prior tooling are fine — that's not the game.
- ✦Playable on Windows, Mac, Linux, or in-browser. Browser builds get played faster. That's not a rule, just true.
- ✦Uploaded before 1:00 PM ET on October 5 with a working download or embed. Late uploads, broken links, and "DM me for the build" don't count.
Assets
- ✦Licensed, purchased, public domain, or your own. Free-to-use asset packs are fine if you have commercial-use rights.
- ✦Credit every third-party asset in your submission description or an in-game credits screen. Missing credits = disqualified.
- ✦Fonts and music get people sued more than art does. Check your licenses.
AI-generated content
- ✦Allowed, but disclose it. State what was AI-generated (art, audio, code, writing) in your submission description.
- ✦Undisclosed AI content is an automatic disqualification. We're not policing tools, we're policing honesty.
- ✦Entries that are substantially AI-generated end-to-end aren't eligible for prizes.
Not allowed, no exceptions
- ✦Sexual content involving minors, or content that sexualizes anyone who appears to be a minor. Instant permanent ban, reported to itch.io.
- ✦Real-world hate speech, harassment campaigns, or content targeting real people or groups for abuse.
- ✦Content promoting or instructing self-harm, suicide, or eating disorders.
- ✦Malware, cryptominers, or anything that touches a player's system beyond what a game should.
- ✦Stolen assets, ripped IP, or fan games built on another company's characters and trademarks. We can't award prize money to something we don't have the rights to promote.
- ✦Plagiarized code, or games cloned from another entry.
Allowed with a content warning
- ✦Violence, gore, horror, adult themes, and mature language are fine. Tag them correctly on itch.io and warn players in your description. Explicit sexual content isn't eligible for prizes even when properly tagged.
Conduct
- ✦Be decent to other entrants in comments and in the Discord. One warning, then removal.
- ✦Don't contact judges about your entry during the judging window. It won't help and it might hurt.
- ✦Eclipse has final say on rule interpretation and disqualification. We'll always tell you why.
Make something rough.
That's the point.
Head to the itch.io jam page to enter, read the full official rules, and join the Discord if anything's unclear.