I think it's interesting to see what different interpretations of the theme people/games cluster around. I imagine the largest category is games that do something with color or chromatic aberration.
My game is a space sim about aberrations from your trajectory. The enemies are really good at predicting where you will be, so when they target you, unless you continually maneuver, you'll get hit.
I focused on the "unwelcome supernatural phenomenon." I focused on the necessities of food, clothing, and shelter that we needed in our lives, and I made a difficult Web puzzle game with the theme of "If you drink water, and you get crazy."
But the puzzle is too hard, so few people watch the ending T_T
My game is an RPG Maker-esque game, where a normal day turns into a dream. With this, you’ll be taken to weird worlds to explore, eventually finding ‘the aberration’, a creature that does not belong. I’ve tried to meet the theme with both a ‘normal day turns weird’ and ‘weird creature’ ideas, both of which I feel make up an aberration.
I feel like my game is simultaneously a game that follows the theme the least while also following it the most.
The definition of Aberration is "a departure from what is normal, usual, or expected, typically one that is unwelcome."
It's a game like Doom or Duke Nukem but you play as the enemies instead. Very basically, it follows the theme as it's a subversion of the Boomer Shooter/FPS genre. Aside from that, nothing is immediately obvious since it seems like a normal game. The only reference to "aberration" is a throwaway line in the game where he mentions how aberrant the situation is for him.
But that's exactly what makes it follow the theme. Compared to all of these games about an "aberration" or being very clearly weird and/or unnerving, there's this simple game looking straight out of a 90's blockbuster. It doesn't look like it follows the theme, which is unusual and unexpected!
Another way it relates to the theme is how it's portrayed. Lots of people who have played my game thus far have went in thinking it was an FPS, but were met instead with a strategy/management game. It's a departure from what was expected! This was intentional as I wanted players to experience that "wow" upon figuring it out.
In the game, it's slowly revealed to you that the aliens aren't actually evil or bad guys. They went to earth to advertize their beer. So in reality, the titular Colonel Kaboom is the REAL bad guy, despite how the story portrays him. The aliens also sell beer and are plant based, something that aliens aren't expected to be/do.
I just love how this game turned out and I'm hoping i can rank pretty high by the end of the jam!
There is nothing unnerving or unexpected in my game when you're playing it, the aberration is the game itself rather than in the game, if it makes sense. It's a platformer with no jump. That's it. I'm a game mechanics type of guy so I kept trying to think of mechanics that seemed deep enough and were worth pursuing. Then I thought about subversing a core definition of a genre and landed on "a platformer with no jump". I had to think of a different way to move the character up instead of jumping and it needs to make the game still be a platformer. In the end I'm really proud of what I came up with, it turned out to be incredibly deep with a lot of interactions and more movement options than your typical platformer. Oh yeah, and because I had to come up with a reason for why the character can't jump I managed to sneak in an "aberration" word in the story, I said he was disabled and wheelchair bound, and other kids bullied him and called him an aberration when growing up but turns out that has nothing to do with my game's interpretation of the theme, hahaha!
when i was thinking about the concept my idea became movement aberration. The first thing that came to mind was having a random chance of moving in a random direction but that's obviously not good material for a game(i guess everything is but i don't know how to suplement that mechanic in a way that makes it fun and fair) i followed with the possibility to know where the player would land if the random chance is triggered wich is better but i had no idea of what to do with that so i kept thinking, in the end i thought about giving the player te ability to teleport anywhere in the screen with the restriction that it will pick a random valid tile in a 3x3 radius. I thought about further improving that by consistently choosing the worst possible tile in the area but i never got arround implementing that.
The theme of mine would be TV screen aberrations, such as signal distortions, broken light lines, chromatic aberrations, etc, but it only really remained an aspect on the visual side of the game since I didn't manage to fully implement it on the gameplay side as well. Were it not for time constraints I would have added a scoring board that would judge your final score for the six categories present (all based on important TV systems), and categories that got bad scores would disrupt the TV, so getting a terrible audio score, for example, would mean the music going silent and glitchy.
I went with with the optical version of the theme, but used planar refractive aberration instead of chromatic aberration. My game is a rail shooter with underwater targets, and thanks to refraction, objects in water are deeper than they appear, and you must adjust your aim to where the targets actually are.
This is possibly the first game to feature physically-accurate planar refraction (using a new rendering method), so as well as being a realistic simulation of optical aberration, it is also a divergence from the usual mechanic of game water being a transparent sheet that can be aimed through like it wasn’t there.
I took a spin on the term aberration. It turns out that Aberration has a moralistic connotation too (according to merriam webster dictionary). My work delves deeper into that particular meaning, and explores the question: "An aberration by whose standards exactly?".
This is a visual novel set in the 1900s wartime era:
My game is a 2d plane that is being projected onto a very small sphere/globe. So you have way more surface area as you walk around than you should, making things appear and disappear at the horizon that won't come back around:
https://itch.io/jam/acerola-jam-0/rate/2583173
Mine… is a mixed bag.
At the very least, my thought process was as follows:
“Given a world where the two protagonists are living dolls with magical cameras, how would you define a deviation from the norm?” (Ignore the fact that this isn’t mentioned in the game at all)
The answer I came up with was “by having someone who can mess with the player themselves”.
And out of that, I concluded that playing with the framebuffer was something that fitted the part.
Since this is the thing that stands between the “world” and the “screen” (between “fantasy” and “reality”), it would make sense that someone who could manipulate it would be considered an aberration in their own way.
Every reality, no matter how fantastical, follows its own set of rules.
(Oh god, this is just yet another eldritch being, ain’t it?)
(I could’ve also had them be absurdly mundane, but then I couldn’t mess with the player’s vision :/)
I considered "aberration" in a couple different ways. Thinking about narrative aberration, I remembered Kafka's Metamorphosis, in which the protagonist wakes up and discovers he's a giant bug.
In Norm's Face, Norm wakes up and can't find his face.
There is also a game play aberration, which I won't share in detail here for spoiler reasons. Broadly speaking, well established expectations of game play will not get the player to Norm's face.
I consider aberrations to be extra-terrestrial beings. In my game, these beings are the trolls who are there to kill anything in their path. However, I wanted to add a somewhat hidden mechanic that's an aberration (A deviation in the normal structure), so I decided that every time the player dies, they get resurrected with what seems a full health bar, but it's actually halved from the original. So every time they die, their health is halved until they are one hit from dying. Although the resurrections are not infinite, you only get 3 :)
I think the most literal reference to the theme in my game is the 'simple' monster BUT I like to think there's another one: the way surroundings are rendered! I've implemented projector-like scanning mechanic that takes screenshot and renders it on objects, creating creepy, distorted and *aberrated* (lol) visuals
Here's a link if you wanna try
https://shy037.itch.io/find-it-before-it-finds-you
I thought of a normal, usual part of a game that I could change, and I came up with controls since they're basically a standard. Changing controls is also a pretty unwelcome change because it requires you to re learn how to play a game from zero, and as if it wasn't enough, a common and intuitive control scheme is something pretty expected in any game. I also added a sudden change of colors, sounds and music to further fit the theme of aberration. Lastly I made sure that you don't quite understand it when you download the game, unless you really look closely at the "controls" part of the game page where there's a question mark to tell you that maybe it's not actually like that.
