Thank you everyone for waiting patiently! This announcement marks the start of the Zero Sugar Added Game Jam, First Edition. You may now start working on your games, which will have to fit the theme:
āFull Steam Ahead!ā
The jam will close at 2026-07-27T00:00:00Z (midnight Monday the 27th, UTC). Please send your submission to our inbox before then.
We wish you all good luck and fun! May the featurecreep not come and haunt you this time :)
Iām loving the theme
Nice! Looking forward to see what everyone comes up with!
wow. good for me that there wonāt be a winner. I have text and boxes and lines and this wonāt change much and I am still unsure I gonna finish in time.
Still enjoying the process so far!
Might as well share mine too! :āD
Iāve always enjoyed writing code at the lower levels with fewer abstractions and Iāve been enjoying this even more than I expected. Wasm-4 did not disappoint, and Iām looking forward to the next jam before this oneās even a quarter of the way through!
Iāve never participated in a game jam before and so maybe Iām taking the theme too literally with a game based on how many rooms you can steam clean before a timer runs out.
Iām not going to lie, it took me a non-trivial amount of time to work out the indexed colour situation. Next will be working out drawing of walls to enclose the roomsā¦ I think I can get away with an edge and corner that can be flipped and rotated as needed.
I really like zigs build system and how you can build out the graph:
const build_assets = b.addSystemCommand(&.{ w4, "png2src", "--zig" });
build_assets.addFileArg(b.path("assets/banner.png"));
build_assets.addFileArg(b.path("assets/landing_bg.png"));
build_assets.addFileArg(b.path("assets/landing_cleaner.png"));
build_assets.addFileArg(b.path("assets/tiles.png"));
build_assets.addArg("-o");
const assets_file = build_assets.addOutputFileArg("assets.zig");
(Could even drop Aseprites CLI in here to export png from my Aseprite files then just update in Aseprite and build)
Regarding your worry of taking the theme too literally: I want you to guess what the rocket from my game is powered by.
Only spent 2 day on weekend but I like how it turned out (spent entire first day drawing title screen). You need to control STEAM trains to deliver goods but you also need to avoid colliding with STEAM trains which you controlled in the past)
https://codeberg.org/andrewkraevskii/steam_train
http://train.andrewkraevskii.me/ (may take a bit for DNS record to propagate)
Top down train tracks here too:
https://codeberg.org/Nae/full-steam-ahead-to-the-station
Playable version linked in the readme.
Bunch of late evenings.
The games are looking nice! excited to play it when I get some time.
I was planning to finish the game on this sunday but i couldnāt finish because my area has suffered from a power today cut 
Hi all,
I am very new to zig (I still havenāt completed all ziglings exercises 
) but I thought challenging myself to make a small game with zig would be a good way to learn a thing or two about the language. so I made a little something for this game jam.
I had fun creating this (whatever this is), so thank you to the people organizing the zero sugar added game jam, it was a great opportunity to mess around with zig.
I also have a train theme: https://codeberg.org/lluq/zero-sugar-added-game-jam-2026
Unfortunately I did not publish a pkayable version yet.
Hey all! Sorry for being a bit late, we hope you had some good sleep now.
Thank you all so much again for taking time to make something, be proud of yourself!
Hereby the full list of all submissions, have fun playing each others games :)
6b0ca42
a3621a5
cdf15aa6d476ae
9df37c5bb0e332f8df74a9188cf2d6c570d77c72f9
e5afcdafb4b8da
a036633d7c9ee07941011e8dfdc5d96732d07e5e8a5a2a7fb276594307e1ddb7 (SHA-256)
Hi all,
This is also my first game jam and I didnāt even expect to submit something. But then I thought more projects also mean more exposure so I should just go for it, even though my duck game takes the theme very liberal but my fiance likes ducks, so here we are.
I wanted to take this opportunity to share some ideas/problems I had working on this:
I tried some things which I expected could help to fit the minimal retro console theme. One of them was opting for u8 values in a lot of places. This lead to a lot of difficult places with underflows. I guess a better approach may be to store u8 values but compute with i16 or something like that. Not sure though.
I tried to keep the map representation small in memory, so I generate new rows coming in just when they are needed and discard old rows (scrolling game). This was surprisingly tricky, especially scrolling the map down until a new row is generated and then āmoving the map back upā.
As I only invested some evenings during the week and this is my first game jam I tried to be fast in some places. This lead to me losing quite a lot of time when searching for the errors my āquick progressionā introducedā¦ So the lesson for me is: Slow and careful is often faster in the long run (even if it is just a few days).
I absolutely do not understand how to produce audio/music
Crashes were very hard to debug as I got basically no output other than something āunreachableā. Iām not sure if there is some way to get more out of it like a source mapping or something like that.
All in all it was very interesting, thank you for the opportunity, I really liked the constraints like 4 colors and 120x120 resolution.
It was also my first game jam. I thought about making something for the whole week but only figured out final idea about 10 hours before the deadline)
1 . For my game i had 16x16 field so i was using u4 for positions. It allowed to use -| 1 and +| 1 to not get overflows. I hope zig gets ranged integers and you would be able to get this working with non power of 2 map. https://codeberg.org/andrewkraevskii/steam_train/src/commit/e0248bee3cbfce75d25da73f28c1228acf160195/src/main.zig#L357
4 , Music is hard. I also donāt know. But making sound effects is much easier. Playing Audio | WASM-4 They have links to audio synthesizers at the bottom. You just click on random sliders until it sounds fitting in situation and just copy paste it from there.
5. Also encountered it. Needed to undo/redo a lot to figure out what did i change to make it crash all of the sudden. Also had problems with stack overflowing and starting to corrupt my screen buffer)
So fun! Thanks everyone for participating!
I played every game now and it was really interesting to see what sort of game play every one came up with. My favorites were Full Steam (Clean) Ahead and Journey to the steam planet.
Art wise my top picks are Cold Steel and Coallect, very impressive!
Now to peruse the code over the coming daysā¦ 
Was a lot of fun playing all the games!
Steam clean was very fun and definitely felt like it was among the more finished of the submissions.
Bubble express was tricky with the 45 second deadline, I had to use one hand for mashing up and the other for left/right.
Last train home was short and very well done.
Steam train was shockingly fun for how simple it is.
And Cold steel I really wish I could play with that beautiful cover art, but it crashes when clicking play :ā(
As for my own game, Steam Planet, I am mostly satisfied with it, though I wouldāve liked to have an ending where you actually reach the planet. Sadly, the cartridge is just barely under 64kb as is.
I like to believe I managed to eliminate all the crashes as whenever I got one I was able to track down the cause within a couple of minutes, however there was one that just occurred completely randomly about a day before I called it quits and Iām afraid that one might still be in there somewhere. The complete lack of any error messages at all doesnāt help.
I wish I took more time to make the gun and explosion sounds less annoying given how frequent they are.
Music wouldāve been nice to have, but even setting aside my lack of knowledge of how to make it I managed to spend all the channels before even thinking about music.
And it definitely would have been nice if I managed to make it at all visible that the rocket, and in fact all the machinery in the game, was supposed to be steampunky. alas
Overall, I think this was a good jam to have as a first. Many thanks to the organizers!
edit: Forgot to mention I also got my game uploaded to the WASM-4 website so its available online.