Epic Games has announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, a four-day game jam running from November 12th to 15th in which teams build playable games in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN) with the help of AI tools.
The official Unreal Engine account announced the jam on X (formerly Twitter) with the line "Vibe your way to 50K." According to the announcement on the Unreal Engine website, teams can have up to five people plus "unlimited agents", and entrants can bring any AI tools into their workflow, from asset generation to coding agents. Registration is open on the jam's itch.io page.
The jam can be joined online from anywhere, with a local game development community, or in person in San Francisco. The in-person event runs on November 14th and 15th at Digital Jungle, where Epic said entrants will build alongside teams from Anthropic, Google, Meshy, OpenAI and SpaceXSI, among others. In-person registration opens on November 1st at 7 AM PT / 10 AM ET, and spots are limited.
Prizes and grants
Each entry can win one main category and one modifier category. The three main categories are Best Overall for Unreal Engine, Best Overall for UEFN and Best Student Project, with each paying $7,500 for first place, $5,000 for second and $2,500 for third.
Standout Unreal Engine and UEFN entries can also earn development continuation grants of up to $50,000 to keep working on their games after the jam. The modifier categories include Best Team at $5,000, plus $2,500 prizes for the best solo game, the best visuals, the best mobile game, the best dev log showing how AI tools were used and the best narrative UEFN game with LLM-powered characters. Epic added that some of its AI partners will give entrants credits for their tools.
What happens before the jam
A kickoff livestream on November 11th at 11 AM PT / 2 PM ET on Twitch, YouTube and X will reveal the theme, along with jam details and special guests. Daily livestreams will follow at the same time on each day of the jam.
Epic has pointed entrants towards setting up agentic coding tools and Model Context Protocol (MCP), a standard for connecting AI agents to software, in Unreal Engine and UEFN before kickoff. The full rules are on the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam itch.io page.
