Vibe jam: what the format rewards, and what it rules out

The vibe jam idea came with rules attached, and the rules mattered more than the theme. Entries had to be playable immediately in a browser, usually with no sign-up and no waiting, and most of the code was expected to be written by an AI rather than typed by hand.

Those rules produce a particular kind of game. Small, immediate, readable in ten seconds, cheap enough to run in a tab that a phone can handle it. That is not a criticism. It is a deliberate design of the competition, and it is why the entries were so easy to share.

Flockbay cannot enter a jam like that. It is a desktop app for Windows and the game it produces runs locally on the copy of Godot bundled inside it. There is no browser preview, no streaming and no hosted link. If your jam requires a URL, stop here and use a web framework.

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Strip out the browser rule and what is left of the vibe jam idea is: make something quickly, do not write the code yourself, be honest that AI wrote it. That describes plenty of jams that accept a downloadable PC or Mac build, and it describes how Flockbay works day to day.

Flockbay writes the GDScript inside your project. You describe the behaviour, he writes it, you play it and say whether it is right. That is the same trade the format is built on, applied to a game that runs on your own machine instead of in a tab.

The clock is the other thing a jam cares about, and it starts differently depending on which kind of game you pick. Making a project asks that first: 2D or 3D, shown as two pictures, with no default and nothing created until you choose. Pick 2D and the first thing on screen is already a game — sky, a band of scenery along the horizon, ground with a ledge cut into it, a platform off to one side, and a person who walks, falls and jumps under the keys you are pressing. On a Friday night that is a better place to start than an empty scene.

What is different is the ceiling, and it is worth being precise about what raises it. A browser game is limited by the tab: a download the player waits through, an object count that has to survive a phone, and a framerate you do not control. A game that runs locally is limited by your machine instead. On the 3D side that is what makes terrain, weather, water and a few hundred moving characters reasonable things to attempt. In a flat game it is the same fact from another direction: how big the world is and how much is moving in it is a question for your machine, not for a download budget.

So the honest version of the trade is not that browser games are flat and desktop games are not. It is that a tab has a budget and your own machine has a different one. A flat game built here is flat because you chose it at project creation, not because something else ran out.

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In the browser-jam version of this, everything goes through prompts because there is nothing else. In Flockbay the world is built by hand, in a builder that behaves like a level editor. In a 3D world that means you place terrain, carve the water, set the weather and put the buildings where you want them.

In a flat world it means ground. You drag to lay cells and drag to erase them, and the tiles, the edges and the collision all fall out of which cells are ground — there is no corner piece to pick out of a palette, and painting the same cells in a different order gets you the same world. On top of that go sprites, placed at an exact position, turn and size, mostly out of the Catalogue inside the app: 55,073 of its 60,648 objects are sprites, searchable by name with a picture of each.

This is the part that separates a game with a place in it from a game with a level in it. Describing a location in a paragraph gets you a plausible guess. Building it gets you the one you had in mind, and it is faster.

So the split is: words for behaviour, hands for the world. Prompting is used where it beats clicking and nowhere else.

An install. Flockbay is downloaded onto a Windows PC, so a jam judged on someone else's locked-down machine is out of reach. Do the install before the jam starts.

A connection while you build. The chat, asset generation and world data all come over the network, so building is an online activity. Playing the finished game is not.

Not much money. The download is free and so is the platform, so building the world, playing it and shipping the entry cost nothing. Flockbay is free on your own AI: your Claude or ChatGPT plan, your own agent, or an API key.

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If the point is that anybody can click a link and be playing in three seconds, this is not your tool and no amount of enthusiasm changes that.

If the point is that you want to make a game quickly on your own Claude or ChatGPT plan, and the people playing it are willing to download a build, then the trade runs the other way: you get a real engine, a world you built yourself, and a game that is not limited to what a tab can render.

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