Heads up, devs: It's Global Game Jam time this weekend

It's that time again: the eighth annual Global Game Jam is happening this weekend, and countless developers are expected to gather at locations around the world to jam on a game based on a secret (for the moment) theme.

This is a notable opportunity for devs to spend a perfectly good weekend playing with novel game ideas, meeting new collaborators and generally staying up too late prototyping something new, in accord with the Global Game Jam's founding vision to "promote sharing, collaboration and experimentation in game dev across the globe."

Anyone interested in checking it out should look over the Global Game Jam rules and consider the list of this year's list of 700+ participating locations, which includes everywhere from Unity's headquarters in San Francisco to -- for the first time ever -- a venue in war-torn South Sudan.

As usual, the jam starts at 5 PM local time Friday (today!) and the deadline to upload work to the Global Game Jam server is 3 PM local time on Sunday. The secret theme of this year's Jam will be publicly revealed after the final jam sites (in Hawaii) begin working -- around roughly 3 AM UTC on Saturday.