Hi everybody! I'm your host! My pen name is Gia Grimoire, but you're welcome to call me Grim or Gia. I'm really passionate about classical history and making it accessible, and I figured a game jam would be a fun way to get people engaging with antiquity. We have 10 days until the jam starts, so here are some resources, tips, and links that might be helpful!
Getting Started
If you need a hand deciding how to get started, sortingh.at is an interactive tool that can give you a personalized idea of which engines to explore with breakdowns of each tool. It can also give you suggestions on where to locate art and audio assets, and advice about design and distribution. It contains plenty of links leading you to sites where you can find the tools and assets listed.
Ancient History
If you want to do research or get more familiar with any concepts, locations, or figures you’re interested in working with, I recommend the Ancient History Encyclopedia (which has an especially handy search function and a useful index) or Ancient-Greece.org. You aren’t obligated to go to town researching, but if you’d like to, it’s an option!
Inspiration
It can be hard to come up with an idea sometimes! Maybe a hoplite drag & drop paper-doll? Something with a water-clock timing mechanic? An interactive, choice-based re-interpretation of a tragedy? A top-down game based on an Olympic competition? That's just me throwing spaghetti at the wall, but you're welcome to make any of those! Here are some other things to look to for inspiration if you're still stuck:
| Historical events! Wars, battles, and plagues make for momentous ones. The Peloponnesian War and the Persian Wars are especially popular periods, featuring events like the Melian Dialogue and the Battle of Marathon, respectively. (If you’re interested in warfare, hoplites may be fun to work with!)
Poleis, or city-states! Athens and Sparta (known as Lacedaemon in antiquity) receive the most attention, but there were hundreds in the Greek world; other notable poleis include Thebes, Corinth, and Argos. Mythology! Of course! Good ol' myth has too many possibilities to list. Roasting Zeus, contemplating Narcissus, art about Athena, getting psyched about Psyche, musing about muses, games about gorgons; whatever sounds interesting to work with is fair game. The Homeric Epics! The Iliad & the Odyssey are replete with interesting characters, concepts, and events to draw inspiration from, but they’re massive epics — pick a detail you find special! Historical figures! Maybe you're interested in Socrates (Plato is well known for his Socratic friend-fiction), the notoriously charismatic-yet-terrible Alcibiades, the military exploits of Thucydides, or the travels of the historian Herodotus. Festivals! The City Dionysia, for instance, honored Dionysus with theatrical productions and involved competitions between playwrights. | Theater! Some very notable productions include Aeschylus’ Oresteia (featuring Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Elektra, Orestes) and Sophocles’ Theban Plays (Oedipus, Oedipus at Colonus, & Antigone). There are also the works of the third great tragedian, Euripides, and the comedian Aristophanes.
Literature! If you’re interested in other ancient lit, check out the poetry of Sappho or Aesop’s fables! Ancient sports! The Olympics were wild. Boxing could get brutal, chariot racing was intense, and the logographer Antiphon once wrote a trial exercise about a (fictitious, but not that unbelievable) case of accidental homicide by javelin. Concepts! Like logos, ethos, pathos, eros, kolakeia (flattery), agones (sing. agon: contest, struggle, debate, trial), arete (excellence, virtue), peitho (persuasion), or phusis (an individual entity’s nature) — these kinds of ideas could form a good central theme. Objects & artifacts! Greeks had some neat stuff that could make for interesting mechanics, like the water-clock used to time speeches at trials (the klepsydra), or the mechanism Athenians used to randomize selection of magistrates (the kleroterion). Creatures! Hydras, gorgons, the Minotaur, Pegasus, Cerberus (who had a lesser-known two-headed brother, Orthrus), and cyclopes are some well known ones, but there are many, MANY others! If you like weird monsters, chimeras, or body horror, Greece has got you covered. |
Other Games
If you’re interested in checking out other games inspired by Greece and Greek myth, try: Ohklos, a fun action roguelike where you manage a mob, Apotheon, a gorgeous heroic action game inspired by black-figure Greek pottery, Medusa’s Labyrinth, a first person horror game based on the Medusa myth, and Endure, a free and fascinating interactive translation experience by Emily Short, featuring a passage from the Odyssey. There’s also the recently-released Theseus, a third person VR game promising a new take on the Minotaur myth, and plenty of others out there.
Advice
Don’t take on too much — you only have three weeks or so. Some Greek concepts are literally epic in scope, and I wouldn’t suggest trying to do something like cram the life history of Agamemnon or all the travels of Odysseus into this jam. Focus on creating something manageable, and don’t feel like you can’t scale your initial idea back if it’s proving too much to wrangle.
Manage your time. This is something I tend to struggle with. It’s okay if you can’t work on your project every day of the jam, but make yourself a timeline to try to stay on track so you know what you need to work on and don’t get overwhelmed.
Use placeholder assets and playtest often! Get everything working and playable before worrying about how it looks.
Save your work often! Ctrl+s!!!
Even if you don’t finish your game, submit your work! Be proud of what you make! It may not be up to your own expectations, but it’s still something worthwhile.
Need a team?
You can work solo or with others. If you're looking for team members, check out the Mytholojam page on CrowdForge, or make a topic here in the jam community to look for likeminded folks!
Devlogs
You’re also welcome to use the community for devlogs if you feel so inclined; I’d love to see your progress, and it can be nice to interact with and inspire other jammers. It can also help you stay organized!
Questions?
If you have questions about the jam or need help with something, you’re welcome to create a topic in the community or send me an email (moonguile[@]gmail[.]com).