Tim I Hely

Announcing: The 2025 Spooky Game Jam

STLGameDev is hosting another Game Jam!

Participants may work independently or in teams. All projects must be created within the two-week jam window, following the official theme announced on Thursday, October 16th, 2025 at 6:00 PM CST

📋 Sign Up

Sign up on Itch.io to receive updates and submit your game!

📅 Timeline

• Theme Reveal: Thursday, October 16 @ 6:00 PM CST

  We will kick-off the Jam with a short presentation on our Discord Channel

• Jam Duration: October 16 → October 30

  You will have two weeks to create your game!

• Showcase: Thursday, October 30 @ 6:30 PM CST → 8:30 PM CST​

  Maryville University - Design & Visual Art building - Room 103/104

  Present your finished game, play others, and celebrate with the community.

  Parking is free in the lot next door.

  Costumes encouraged!

🏫 In-Person Work Sessions

We are also hosting Work-Up Sessions at local St. Louis County Library branches. These are opportunities to collaborate, receive feedback, or simply work alongside fellow participants:

Out-of-the-box, Unity (among other engines) seems to only want to use Xinput-devices for inputs (like gamepads) in the Input Manager, which means that it doesn’t know how to talk to older, generic input devices by default. We learned this the hard way while trying to set up our Demo Arcade Machine.

After some experimentation, Colin (miniscule) figured out a solution which, even if you are not submitting a game for us to use in out demos, we still want to show you how to fix so that anyone, with any kind of controller, can play your game.

Now that it’s been a few weeks and the dust has settled after Global Game Jam 2025, we’d like to take a moment to reflect on the experience of organizing the event.

This was the 15th Global Game Jam we have run locally, and at least our 28th Game Jam event (so many we’ve kind of lost count)- although it was the first time for a few of our team members.

Welcome to a new era of game development in St. Louis!

St. Louis has had a thriving Game Development community in some capacity for over 14 years. Around 9 years ago it evolved into a nonprofit organization, the St. Louis Game Developer Co-op.

Last month leadership of the Co-op announced they would be stepping down and dissolving the non-profit organization. This came as a bit of a shock to some long-time community members and a small group of us banded together to make sure that the community would still have support from people who care. The Co-op leadership transferred over as many of the existing community accounts and assets as possible, and our new group began working on plans to rebuild.