New partner: Turkic Game Jam

A pan-Turkic game development hackathon

The Turkic Game Jam (TGJ) — turkicgamejam.com — is an international game development hackathon organized under the Turkic Game Developers Association (TuGDA) and held simultaneously across multiple countries within the Turkic world. Game developers, artists, programmers, and designers compete in teams of two to four to produce original, playable game prototypes within a 48-hour window, guided by a shared thematic framework rooted in Turkic cultural heritage.

TGJ was inaugurated in 2025 and held its second edition in June 2026. In just two editions it has grown from five to six participating countries and recorded an over 50% year-over-year increase in registered participants — establishing itself as the largest game development event in the Turkic region.

How it works: local stage → Grand Final

TGJ runs on a two-stage format that combines local community engagement with international competition.

• Local stage. In each country, teams of 2–4 build a complete game prototype from scratch inside the 48-hour window, starting the moment the theme is announced. A local jury of game-industry professionals, designers, and developers reviews the entries and selects the top teams to advance.
• Grand Final. Finalist teams from every participating country gather in a single host city to present their games before an international jury and audience. It's both a competition and an industry networking event — direct access to investors, professionals, and peers from across the region. The host city rotates among participating countries each year.

Editions so far

2025 — the first edition

The inaugural TGJ ran across five countries — Azerbaijan, Türkiye, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Hungary — with 130+ registered participants and 50+ submitted games. In Azerbaijan, the local stage was organized by Gamepons and IGDA Azerbaijan, with 14 teams and more than 60 participants building under the theme "Turkic Myths and Stories." The top five Azerbaijani teams were PixelNodes, Virtue, Compot Games, No Studio, and Trojan Horse Studios, with Virtue and Trojan Horse Studios advancing to represent Azerbaijan at the Grand Final. The 2025 Grand Final was hosted in Baku, organized by Gamepons and IGDA Azerbaijan and supported by Yaradıcı Center and the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Azerbaijan.

2026 — the second edition

The second edition ran across six countries, with Northern Cyprus joining for the first time. The local stages recorded 200+ registered participants and 90+ submitted games — an over 50% increase in registrations and over 60% increase in submissions versus 2025. In Azerbaijan, again organized by Gamepons and IGDA Azerbaijan, more than 20 teams and over 70 participants took part. The 2026 Grand Final will be held in Budapest, Hungary.

The themes

TGJ themes are drawn from Turkic cultural heritage and written as open-ended design briefs that fit a wide range of genres.

In 2025, the single theme — Turkic Myths and Stories — invited participants to draw on the folklore, oral traditions, and mythology of the Turkic world, producing everything from narrative adventures to action games centered on cultural figures rarely seen in global media.

In 2026, five concurrent themes were announced, each tied to an element of Turkic cultural and historical life:

• Ceremony — designing around the performance, disruption, or completion of a structured ritual.
• Nomad — movement-based mechanics: travel, pursuit, and continuous forward motion.
• Knot — drawing from carpet weaving, puzzle structures of connection, entanglement, and resolution.
• Sky — referencing Tengri and the cosmological significance of the sky, opening navigation, ascent, and environmental challenge.
• Fire — centered on the hearth, framing survival, resource management, and endurance.

Partners and supporters

The Azerbaijani chapter of TGJ 2026 was made possible by institutional and industry partners. Yaradıcı Center was the venue partner, providing the space in Baku for the 48-hour local stage. Xsolla joined as the travel partner, covering travel and logistics for the Azerbaijani finalist teams attending the Grand Final in Budapest. The 2025 Grand Final in Baku was supported by Yaradıcı Center and the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Azerbaijan — institutional recognition of the event from its very first edition.

HackathonHost becomes a TGJ partner

The Azerbaijan local stage of TGJ 2026 doubled as a soft launch for HackathonHost — a real-world test of running the whole event on one platform: registration, teams, weighted jury scoring, live control, and certificates, all in one place for a 70-plus-person, 48-hour jam. The verdict was clear: it ran great, and it took the spreadsheet-and-inbox scramble out of organizing the event.

On the strength of that pilot, HackathonHost has become a partner of the Turkic Game Jam. From next year, all TGJ events are planned to be hosted on HackathonHost — across every participating country — joining partners like Yaradıcı Center and Xsolla in supporting the jam. Azerbaijan was where it was proven; from here, it's the platform the whole event runs on.

Follow along

The Turkic Game Jam grows every year — more countries, more games, more developers building from a shared heritage. The official home is turkicgamejam.com. To see how a local stage is run end-to-end, read our Turkic Game Jam 2026 — Azerbaijan case study, or how to run a game jam yourself.

Thinking about running your own jam — Turkic-themed or otherwise? That's exactly what HackathonHost is built for: registration, teambuilding, weighted scoring, live control, and certificates end-to-end, so a small team can run a professional event. See how it works and what it costs.