My first question is: will there be a specific theme apart from local folklor? This bugs me because the Jam starts in 25 days, and this is enough information to make a good game until the jam starts.
The second question ties with the first one: so we can start making a game today? Or do we wait till the jam starts? How can you check if a game was made way before the jam begun?
1) The important thing is that you use something from local folklore as the core element of your horror game. The theme is quite open because we want truly to see in how many ways local folklore could be the main theme of a horror game. A good hint could be to use the "setting/creature/plot" based on urban legends and myths from your area. However, a key element is to have references to link to your local folklore (including simply Wikipedia or similar), just to avoid situations like "my cousin told me this story".
2) We understand your doubts since we kept this part a bit open. Of course, in the spirit of participating in a game jam, you should try to do the majority of the coding during the jam. So, ideally, you can spend the time before the jam planning, documenting, and building assets. However, we also understand that if somebody has a half-baked game out there really fitting for the jam, it would be a shame not to include it, since the purpose is also to bring together in the same space horror and folklore games. Of course, checking if this gets abused is very difficult, and we must rely on the goodwill of people joining the jam, especially since it is unranked. For the games selected to be part of our special article/video, we will do more scrupulous checking. However, we hope you understand that this also scales with the amount of games submitted by the very end.
I hope this clarifies your questions. Let me know if you have other questions.
However, a key element is to have references to link to your local folklore (including simply Wikipedia or similar), just to avoid situations like "my cousin told me this story".
To this part. Is it really that unwanted? I live in a small city and we don't have any articles about our spooky tales, and quite a few of those could make an interesting game. If I were to have some internet sources, I'd need to start researching my whole country, and that would be not as "personal" and local anymore.
If that's an issue, that is totally ok as well. Just wanna know beforehand.
I understand your concern, of course there could be exceptions but we want to try to keep the reference rule to avoid a misuse of the "based on folklore" nature of the jam. If you can, try to provide a reference of any kind. If this is really impossible, try to use something a bit broader. Since the jam is horror-oriented, there are still a lot of country-specific tales or legends never used in such a format.
