I've got a lot of other stuff going on by end of 2019 so can't allocate more than maybe 2 hrs/day to this. So I would find making an entire (substantial) game in this span difficult and challenging to do well on my own. A small, short thing though is possible.

That said, I am a pretty capable 3d artist and a huge fan of the Myst series and similar puzzle games so this seems right up my alley. 

I even backed The Five Cores Remastered on Kickstarter so have already supported Icehouse a little bit indirectly without even realizing Iridescent Waves was part of Icehouse.

I am a bit experienced with Unity / Playmaker, so will likely use that as a framework. I have been testing a creative 360 degree VR method that allows a panoramic prerendered game interface like was seen in Myst 3: Exile or Scratches to function in full 3d VR but have yet to think of or design a project that would make use of it. This might be the chance to come up with one. 

If somebody would like to do some music on my project, that would be nice. But in general, I will probably figure out how to do this on my own with or without any assistance on the soundtrack. 

I don't yet have a design (plan) or story / name for my game but will attempt to come up with a production plan soon. And when the game jam starts, I will get to work on it. 

Thanks, Icehouse, for putting this game jam together.

-Matthew Hornbostel, creator of https://matthornb.itch.io and http://miniaturemultiverse.com.

Hi Matthew, welcome at the Icehouse Jam! Thanks for thinking of your entry and sharing your thoughts ;)

We're excited to discover what you're going to do. You have seen indeed that we love Myst-like and 1st-person adventure games in general, so you'll have all our attention if you decide to make such a game! (of course there is no obligation to do this)

Thanks also for your support of The Five Cores Remastered: I'm sure Iridescent will be touched to see that you participate to our Jam. 
Just a quick note regarding this: the members of the collective are just people who help each others in their free time, we're just an online group, a gathering of indie devs who share ideas in common - even though we try to make it "official". Everyone with a bit of motivation and skills can potentially join us, there's no contract to sign or things like that (we're not a publisher, there's no money involved, each Creator in the collective remains free and keeps his righs and ideas, etc). Of course we have to be careful to who is joining us in order to save our original "spirit", so it often takes time if we accept a new Member.
I was saying all that to make it clear that, by supporting Iridescend and The Five Cores on Kickstarter, you supported him and his game only (we want to be sure that people are not mistaken: we don't take any money from the KS of our members!).  But it is true that helping one of us always has a good indirect impact for all the collective, so it is always great. That's also how we try to help each others! Giving exposure to one of our projects/creators will help the others too. I'm sure you understand.

Regarding the creation of your game, if you can use such an engine such as Unity I'm sure you'll make something very interesting. Most people in our collective who try to do Myst-like adventures with 360° views like Myst 3 Exile are using 2d engines like Adventure Maker or Dagon. If you have a way to do it in Unity (and know how to), you can be sure that we'll be very interested! Go ahead and surprise us :) Good luck!

And regarding the music of your game, you'll probably find people on our Discord or forums. Some of our Members are music composers (Python Blue and Yazorius). I don't know if they will be available for you (but they can't be available for all projects). But there will probably be other music composers. Recently on Discord someone named lincolnlogs introduced himself as a music composer available for this Jam, so that could be a good opportunity for you to try to contatc him? I can't tell more about him, he's not shared other info so far.

Don't hesitate to come join us on our Discord and/or forums to become officially a Friend of the collective, and who knows, little by little, week after week, you could become officially a Member that we will support and who will support us? :)  Or it could be even faster if you win the membership in this Jam (it's one of the Prizes) hehe! 

I hope I replied to your questions. Can't wait to see what's going to happen! From what I see on your site you have already solide bases in 3D and illustration. Let's keep in touch. Good luck for the Jam!

Thanks for your helpful replies!

I will definitely start getting involved in the Discord soon and will try contacting the musicians you have mentioned.

And yes, I have a decently functional production framework for 360-degree nodes already figured out in Unity, that I figured out while developing the first few areas of Miniature Multiverse (That project is still incomplete but steadily moving forward - I would now expect it to be done some time around February or March 2020 at the rate things have been going.)

I actually tried Dagon at one point when that was first emerging, and I once attempted a big game with Adventure Maker, a project I discontinued almost a decade ago because even then I saw 'the writing on the wall' and realized that the engine probably had no long term future. The developer stopped updating the engine in something like 2007 or 2008, and it is surprising actually that anyone still uses it given how many of the advanced or plugin features in its output become increasingly broken for each and every version of Windows released after XP.  I even tried messing with a panoramic VR tour engine once, that was not even a game engine but I figured out sneaky workaround ways to script simple puzzles and interactions in it with varying game states.

Eventually though I realized Unity could do this and I started testing that with a little proof of concept... and I knew it could work.

Doubly cool is that I think it can even be done stereo VR, ie with convincing eye separation depth, under certain conditions. I have successfully tried a couple of methods that both work for that. One - which is a little nicer looking - requires the rendered scene source be a 3d scene rendered in stereo (two 360-degree rendered versions of every node and transition slightly offset) the other is a weird set of tricks using a custom designed equirectangular displacement map applied to reshape and distort the node sphere, so that from the center the illusion of varying and detailed depth is possible, even when the panorama is not 3d rendered and is primarily something else like miniature photography. (as is of course the case with about 75% of the imagery in Miniature Multiverse.)

I am toying with a range of possible rough ideas for this game jam but without the secondary theme revealed I am hesitant to fully design any storyline, or puzzles that fit it well, mostly I am waiting for the thing to start before identifying where exactly I want to go with this. Designing and coming up with neat ideas, IMO, is fun but not anywhere near as time consuming as a high quality execution, that makes those ideas into a good, polished experience.

I will say I have a couple of interesting loosely thought-out stories woven around notable myths / legends... that lead to some intriguingly weird reinterpretations of stories 'everybody already knows' and suggests an alternative explanation or context for the story that is arguably even stranger and maybe more interesting than the straightforward myth was originally in the first place.

I like the sense of having the player dumped into the storyline initially having no clue where it is headed. Keep them guessing, hit them with an interesting reveal or two - roughly at the midpoint and near the ending - to keep them off guard and intrigued as it all progresses, unsure of certain aspects of the story and trying to make sense of the information they have learned, trying to answer their questions through exploring, observing, and solving puzzles. Basically the prototypical feeling of confused fascination players felt when dumped onto the dock on Myst Island back in '93, before the thing became less mysterious and more... known and quantified.

Part of the trick is to do this in some ways I haven't already committed to doing elsewhere in any of my other stories (past or currently in development). I think I may have the seed of something sort of fresh though, a bit different than what I have already tried or planned elsewhere. A rough story structure which could work, could become something really cool if I pull it off competently and resolve the specific details and logic, delivering well on the inherent potential within its premise.

But who knows, I may botch it when time starts to run out. Can't allow feature creep here on a three week effort and need to keep things reasonably simple to meet the deadline.    :/