ZABAL Gamez.
A three-month Build-A-Thon. Free, open to anyone, any tools. Three tracks, and a Finals decided by building in public.
What it is
ZABAL Gamez is The ZAO's three-month Build-A-Thon. June workshops, July open build, August Finals. It is free, open to anyone, and you can use any tools you like. It is not a video game contest.
Three tracks
- Artist - musical and visual work
- Builder - developers and anyone learning to be one
- Creator - media and distribution
How the Finals work
The August Finals run in two phases across four weeks.
- Weeks 1 and 2, the open qualifier. Everyone who submitted is on the leaderboard. You earn points by posting a daily update on what you are building, and the community adds votes. Points and votes together pick the top two in each track.
- Weeks 3 and 4, the battle. The top two per track go head to head, one round each week.
Selection is deliberately built out of public building. The daily updates are not paperwork, they are the qualifier.
What it does not have
A season costs money to run and currently has no funding model of its own. It is carried by the people running it. That is worth knowing if you are designing something here: the event you would be funding is the one you are competing in.
The open problem
This is the part we have not solved, and it is the August Finals bonus challenge.
Every funding path above is either a grant, a sponsor, or a ticket. All three are one-directional: money comes in, the event happens, and the people who showed up own none of what they helped make. There is no way for the community that funds something to share in it afterwards.
What already exists inside ZAO, so you are not rediscovering it: a creator-coin launcher with multi-recipient fee splits (Sparkz, shipped), a decided ticketing stack of Unlock plus POAP for ZAOstock, an evaluated set of event treasury tools, and a raw idea for a group crowdfund that was never scoped. What does not exist is fan co-ownership, anything that works across more than one event, and any way to reward people after an event rather than before it.
Design one of those and you are inventing something. Build another creator token and you are rebuilding what is already running.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page traces to a source. If one looks wrong, it is checkable.
- Format, tracks and season structure: this repo's CLAUDE.md, the canonical statement of current state
- Finals two-phase format locked 2026-07-28: ZAOOS project memory on the August pipeline