Brackeys Game Jam 2026.1:
One Week, Thousands Of Games

The Brackeys Game Jam 2026.1 wrapped up on March 8th, capping a three-week arc that started February 15th with the theme reveal and ended with the community vote. For those unfamiliar — Brackeys runs twice a year, takes one week to build, and gives you two more weeks for rating. It's a rhythm that works.

House Rules took first place overall, and also picked up wins in Enjoyment and Gameplay. It's a jam that rewards actual game feel over technical ambition, and House Rules nailed the landing.

Why Brackeys Works So Well For New Devs

Ludum Dare has the legacy. Global Game Jam has the scale. But Brackeys — at least in our opinion — has the best learning curve for someone doing their first serious jam. A few reasons:

A full week is the right amount of time.

48 hours is brutal for a first-timer. You barely have time to decide on a scope, let alone iterate on it. A week is long enough to recover from a bad direction on day 2 and still ship something polished. It's also short enough that scope creep has a hard ceiling.

The community is explicitly beginner-friendly.

The Brackeys YouTube channel has been teaching people how to make games for years — Unity, Unreal, Godot, game design fundamentals. The jam community inherits that DNA. There's a jam_find_a_team channel on Discord where newer devs can pair up with artists or coders. That's not universal in jam culture.

The rules don't punish you for using assets.

Brackeys' stance: use any engine, use any assets you're properly licensed for, credit where credit is due. This is a subtle but massive difference from stricter jams where asset use is penalized. If you're a designer who can't draw, being allowed to pull from Kenney.nl or Itch's free asset packs means you can actually finish something.

Your game stays yours.

Anything you make during the Brackeys jam is your property. They claim no rights. The only exception: your submission might get featured in a Brackeys YouTube video or on social channels. That's a feature, not a bug — free exposure to hundreds of thousands of indie dev viewers.

The Rating System Is The Secret Sauce

Your game gets rated on five axes: Innovation, Theme, Gameplay, Graphics, and Audio. The overall winner is the sum. You need 20+ ratings to be eligible to win overall — which means the voting period isn't passive. You have to play other people's games to get yours seen.

This turns the post-jam phase into something valuable on its own: you spend two weeks playing other devs' jam games. You see what works. You see what doesn't. You see how people solved the theme prompt in ways you didn't consider. It's the most concentrated game design education you'll get in two weeks anywhere, and it's free.

What This Jam's Winners Got Right

Looking at the top entries this cycle, a few patterns showed up repeatedly:

• A 60-second hook. The games that scored well could be understood in less than a minute. Jurors are playing hundreds of games — if yours requires a tutorial, you've lost half the voters before they finish reading.
• Audio that doesn't feel optional. A lot of jam entries skip audio or bolt it on at the end. The winners wove it into core feedback — footsteps, UI, hit sounds, ambient. It's the fastest way to feel "done."
• Scope so small it hurt. The overall winner this round is a one-mechanic game executed really well. Bigger ideas didn't beat smaller, tighter ideas. They almost never do.
• A visual identity, not just "art." You don't need good art to win a jam. You need consistent art. Pick one look and commit to it.

When's The Next One?

Brackeys Game Jam 2026.2 has dates locked: August 23 – September 13, 2026. That's a build window of August 23–30 (a full week), followed by two weeks of rating. Registration is already open on itch.io and they'll email you about a month before the theme is announced.

How We'd Play It

If you're on the fence about entering: do it. Even if you don't finish. Even if it's bad. The Brackeys community has explicitly tuned itself for people who are trying a game jam for the first time, and the rating system means you will get feedback on whatever you ship.

The boilerplate here: start smaller than you think. Use an engine you already know (don't learn Godot during your first jam). Get audio in on day two, not day six. Get a playable loop running before you add features. If you hit day 5 and the core loop isn't fun yet, cut everything else and make the loop fun.

And watch the post-mortem videos on the Brackeys channel — they talk about what works and what doesn't, which is unusual transparency for a jam host.

We'll have team members entering 2026.2 in August. If you're in Utah and want to team up, or if you're anywhere and want to collab remotely, hit us up.

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— Entering Brackeys 2026.2 and looking for a collaborator? Email contact@secondshotstudio.com.