Game-Off is a competition held by GitHub. It’s how I personally am getting into game development. Basically you get the month of November to develop a game by yourself or with your team before Dec/1/17. If you’ve been making games since you left the womb then this won’t be too much of a challenge but for people like me, looking for motivation to get into creating more projects on my own, it’s a great opportunity to try something new. Now you may be wondering, “it’s a contest? What are the prizes?” well, they feature it front page on github and on itch.io.
This month’s theme is “throwback”, but don’t feel too limited by this prompt, pretty much anything can be considered for this contest. This would be one of the best opportunities of group coding to join because of how supportive and helpful the communities are. There are many different resources for free tools to asking questions. If you’re on the fence on joining, just putting a game skeleton (not fully fleshed out with graphics, sounds, etc.) is fine too. It’s about the journey of creating your first projects and gaining more experience in coding that you can learn from for next year.
If you want more information on entering and even starting out with GitHub, go here: https://itch.io/jam/game-off-2017
Happy Coding and Good luck!