Many a critically acclaimed video game has come from game jams. Spelunky, Superhot, and The Binding of Isaac, to name a few. But the games from this jam will never be given that sort of praise - and they aren't looking for it. This is a game jam where the goal is to make the worst possible game imaginable. It's a place to let loose and really unleash your inner demons on the world.
"Let's make a jam but where the goal is to go against everything in those amazing design videos [Game Makers Toolkit creator Mark Brown] makes," says Adrien Dittrick, the founder of this unholy exercise. "We wanted games to break your ears, be in the uncanny valley, always be displeasing to look at, unfair, frustrating, all that. So we compiled those judging criteria and made a very serious competition where the goal was to make a game which gets the lowest possible rating out of those criteria. We also added microtransactions because that's the worst thing."
This jam is a great opportunity for people to make games with absolutely no pressure or expectations. "This is how I used to make video games," Dittrick tells me. "I started making games 17 years ago, Back then all you need to make a game just take some really bad graphics, cobble together some kind of gameplay, and steal amazing music and there you have a great game. At some point I started wondering, 'Well, why am I not making those anymore?'"
The game jam runs from today (Friday 10) to Sunday 19, and anyone can enter. "I've seen someone whose first game was an extremely bad game," says Dittrick affectionately. "A person who was actually a developer - not a game developer, but who knew code and had never made a game before - I told him, 'Well, you could try my jam.' He made a really bad game and it was great! I don't think I've had any seasoned game dev professionals in yet, but I know some people who've been making games for a while and took part in this because it was fun."
You can take part in the jam by heading over to the Game Breaker's Toolkit itch.io page, and you can become a part of its Discord community to stay up to date with all the best terrible games out there.