The Wavedash Summer Jam ran from July 17 to July 26, 2026. The theme, revealed the moment the jam opened, was BAD CONNECTION.
Judging is now finished. Entries were scored on five criteria: alignment with theme, creativity, interactivity and gameplay, technical completeness, and use of the Wavedash platform, with bonus points for SDK features like leaderboards, achievements, and cloud saves.
"Bad connection" turned out to be a wide open prompt. Across the top five alone it produced a séance switchboard, a data-center outbreak, a dating-app haunting, a physics run through public WiFi, and a blind date between two broken robots.
Here are the top five, counting down from fifth place.
5. Dating.data
by lenthesmiledev
A dating sim about a blind date between two faulty robots. Rather than picking from a list of dialogue options, you drag words together to link them into what you're trying to say (communication as an assembly problem) which is a neat fit for a theme about signals not getting through.
4. Knock Knock
by Stitched
A horror game about finding love on a dating app while you move out of your apartment. Things start to go wrong when a bad connection from a previous date refuses to leave you alone. The only entry in the jam to read the theme as a horror premise.
3. Packet Loss
by sumukhjoshi75
A top-down survival game set in a data center during a server crisis. A virus spreads across 20 server racks in real time while your Data Pool drains. You patch infected racks, deploy antivirus towers, and use sprint bursts to reach whatever is failing next. Every 10 patches, the virus escalates, duplicating infections and jumping between adjacent racks.
No scripted waves and no boss fights, just a difficulty curve you create yourself. Ships with 23 achievement categories and a competitive leaderboard.
2. TTL8!
by aria
A terrible fate has befallen you… having to eat with no YouTube!
A bouncy physics arcade game about braving the depths of "public WiFi" to restore your lost connection. Easy to bounce around in, considerably harder to route through a stage efficiently (which is where the leaderboard comes in).
1. Hold, Please — Grand Prize
by Project Ditto
You work nights at an afterlife telephone exchange. The living ring in wanting to speak to someone who died. They never say the name. They say 'my late mother, the one I miss most at Christmas,' and then they wait.
You work out who the caller means from ten case files, then physically carry the telephone plugs across the floor to connect them. The lines can't cross. Too many live connections trips the breaker. Eight nights, three strikes each.
It's a deduction puzzle built out of a switchboard, and it took the grand prize.
Prizes
| Place | Game | Prize |
|---|---|---|
| 1st | Hold, Please | $1,000 |
| 2nd | TTL8! | $500 |
| 3rd | Packet Loss | $250 |
| 4th | Knock Knock | $125 |
| 5th | Dating.data | $75 |
Everyone who submitted a build receives $10 in Wavedash credits, usable on any game on the site, along with written feedback scored on the same rubric the judges used.
Thank you to everyone who built something in ten days, and to everyone who played and voted along the way. All five winners run instantly in your browser.
Another jam is coming. Join the Wavedash Discord to hear about it first.