Cold Case Jam: Finish Your Mystery Game!
Introducing a "chill" game jam for the Winter season!
Happy Mystery Monday!
Every developer has at least one project you swore you’d finish, but haven’t touched in months or years. It’s been sitting on your hard drive like an unsolved case file, waiting for the day you’d come back to crack it open.
Starting this November, you'll have the opportunity to make it happen!
The upcoming Cold Case Jam is your chance to dig out your abandoned mystery game project, dust it off, and make real progress before the year ends. If you can finish it, then great — but just like when solving a real cold case, any amount of meaningful progress will count.
Why host the Cold Case Jam?
We already host the Mystery Game Jam each year in April, so why have another one?
The idea came to me while setting up our most recent jam. Some people had asked me if they would be allowed to work on old projects for that event, and I had to tell them "no, only new projects are allowed."
But there was a bit of a harsh reality here: both Mystery Game Jams featured a large percentage of demos rather than completed projects. It’s clear that it’s still very hard to start a new game from scratch and finish it in a single month.
So considering the large amount of unfinished mystery games out in the world, and the desire that creators had to come back to such projects, I wanted to create a different event to incentivize creators to finish what they once started.
So I started brainstorming a second event that we could hold — ideally during Winter, since that's a healthy amount of time after May (when the Mystery Game Jam ends).
And then it just kinda clicked: Winter is cold, and abandoned mysteries are a lot like "cold cases" too. So that's how Cold Case Jam was born!
Important information
The jam will begin on November 1st and end on December 31st.
Depending on your timezone, this will be shortly before or during New Year's Eve, but ideally you'll be submitting a bit earlier at a time convenient for you. Either way, you'll have 60 days to work on your old project and end the year with a bang.
All of the rules and eligibility criteria are on the jam page, but I do want to go over some details here.
Firstly, the rules are generally the same as the rules for the regular Mystery Game Jams. But Cold Case Jam has a new requirement.
To qualify as a cold case, your game must:
Be a mystery game.
Have been publicly announced as "in development" before August 2025.
Not be released in a completed form before the start of the jam.
Have been put on hold or otherwise not worked on for a meaningful amount of time.
Please note that although your game does need to be a mystery game, it does not need to involve the solving of any cold cases, nor any themes related to Winter, ice, snow, etc. There is no theme entries need to follow.
It is a requirement to have started work on your game prior to August 2025 to ensure that games aren't created and worked on significantly ahead of time solely for the Cold Case Jam. However, the date is late enough so that it lets you finish projects from other jams, including the Mystery Game Jam.
Also, a "public announcement" just means anything shown to the general public indicating that your project is real and that you started working on it at that time. It doesn't need to be anything big — even just a social media post is fine. A link to this announcement will be required when submitting your entry. Don’t overthink it, we just want some kind of proof that your entry really is a cold case.
The rule about "a meaningful amount of time" is intended to accommodate a wide variety of circumstances. If you've been working on a project for a while and just happen to have it ready for November/December, then that's not really in the spirit of the jam. But if your project was on hold long enough that you lost momentum, forgot parts of it, or weren’t sure you’d ever come back to it, then that definitely counts.
What happens after the jam?
This is just a “chill” jam at the end of the year, so there is no voting nor any real prizes. It’s not meant to be a competition between teams, but an internal motivator to get you to finally finish your mystery game (or at least, make progress on it).
That said, if you’re a member of our Discord server and you end up submitting a valid entry, you will be a given a special role to commemorate your success. We hope that this is enough encouragement to sign up and give it a shot!
Why participate?
Our mystery game projects unfortunately go unfinished all the time. Maybe the scope was too ambitious, or the story too complex, so we set it aside, hoping that we'll find the time to get back to it someday. For many of us, we just need a good enough reason to actually revisit it.
By participating, you can finally achieve your goal of finishing a once-abandoned project. There’s always something satisfying about closing out unfinished business, especially before the end of the year. And with a clear deadline, there’s no better motivation to finally reopen your game's cold case.
Plus, you won’t be doing it alone. You’ll be part of a community of other mystery game developers, each bringing their own long-lost projects back into the light. Along the way, you’ll share your progress, swap feedback, and maybe even inspire someone else to pick up their own abandoned work.
Final thoughts
If Cold Case Jam sounds fun, be sure to register on the official jam page!
I'm really looking forward to seeing your mystery game projects completed!
And as always, if you have any questions, comments, suggestions, or concerns, feel free to let me know. It's a bit different from the typical game jam, but I hope that's exactly what will make it so much fun!
Thanks for reading!
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