Super excited for this jam. I've been wanting to make something like Artefact for a while. I'd love to hear what other people are planning to make!
I could finally make use of my Philosophy/Religious studies double major and make a game about evolving ideas or religious doctrine. Fictional religions made up of ideas or truisms that evolve and change over time as they schism, become popular, have figures or ideas forgotten or used in popular culture until they have almost completely shed their original meaning. That could be fun.
I'm going to be designing something inspired by The Banner Saga - in this case, the banner itself, the literal tapestry, hundreds of meters long, chronicling a community's voyage, hardships and triumphs. Lots of questions regarding who works on the banner, what is left out, what is embellished, what is included, what happens when the community splits, who holds the banner, etc.
I'm thinking of having a bit of an extension of the SRD with my idea. You play as an object sent back in time from some far flung future, and your agents are those who find you and learn from you. You might be a record, a raygun, or something like that. As play goes on, you reveal through your writing what future you come from, and your agents determine whether it comes to pass or not.
Man do I love time travel stories. I'm curious to see how you adapt the game to fit the "whether it comes to pass or not" part. Do the things that happen to your object reinforce the time loopiness/the idea that the past and future are concrete so that you have to work toward some kind of preset condition? Or does every change imply a "you crush the butterfly and everything is changeable" time travel rule?
It's more a case of, at the end of the game, you figure out two things: what future you came from judging by how people reacted to you, and whether that future came to pass because of how people acted using you. For instance, if everyone who used you suddenly began watching the skies and reading up on aliens, you can guess it was an alien invasion. And if no-one using you bought you to wider attention or used their power to try and change the course of history, aliens probably happen again.
Holy hell yes, I've been waiting for something like this to come around.
I've never designed a solo game before, but I do have one at the back of my mind that's more or less suited for this particular idea.
It's a bit of a mixture between Artefact and BoB, subject-wise at least.
You play as The Horse, carrying wannabe adventurers to their stabs at glory and ultimately their doom.
As you finally rest your hooves, contemplate the various riders you carried to an uncertain fate, look back at your accomplishments, shortcomings and relationships, be it as Noble Steed, a Scourging Nightmare, or something else entirely.
Working Title: Horse For The Kingdom
Not sure if it's a fitting idea, so any feedback at all is welcome!
Hmm, i'm finally diving into the SRD and this idea...might not fit the Object's definition:
The Object cannot act alone, it needs to be used by an Agent.
Unless I commit to focus on the Horse's interactions with the rider and the places they venture into, I need to find a solution to make it "stationary" in some way. But is the Horse always docile? Can the Horse run away? Can it throw off its Rider?
Questions questions questions.
I've only had a surface read of the rules, but I think a horse would be pretty cool. Perhaps the horse is usually "obedient" and "stationery" like an object, doing as his rider instructs, except when his "instinct" or "fear" traits are triggered. Like "afraid of fire" or "always docile" or "cannot refuse food". As I said, still didn't read the rules, but horse idea sounds awesome.
Firstly, feel free to pick and choose from the SRD, obviously! Ignore what you don’t like, take what you do & reshape it to fit.
I think the main reason for emphasising ‘the object cannot act alone’ is that you can risk devaluing the influence of the agents if the object can just do whatever it wants, whenever it likes. But here, clearly you’ve got an animal that is typically in servitude to a rider, so I think it should work really nicely. Sure, your horse might spend a year running around in the moors, but eventually the story will pick back up when someone comes to ride them again.
This would be my first game jam, so I've no idea how close I'll get to making something finished, but I love having a goal. I'm currently working with the idea of a computer program, starting with something really small that gets integrated into larger and larger programs over time. What kinds of bugs would persist (one might think of them as artifacts, eh?) from version to version? My hope is to play with the conceit of AI and its emerging consciousness, how a text file might grow and compound into something immeasurably complicated.
That sounds exactly like my software project at work. Every time it changes hands to a more skilled developer, it grows exponentially more complex (or gets ported to another language), and when there are no skilled developers on staff, it stagnates until a new one is hired. I'd be willing to give it a try if you want a play tester.
I’m toying with the idea of a game about pets/local animals after skimming the SRD.
It puts a twist on it as pets are (generally) much shorter-lived and have some agency.
However, using living things and figuring out why they’d be sent away or escape has a lot of potential for heartbreak so I’ll need to give it some extra thought and at minimum have some decent content warnings I think.
I have this idea but I think it might be too intense to implement, what do y'all think?
There's this novel I read a couple of years ago called 'A Canticle for Leibowitz', that I've been thinking a lot about lately, and I'm thinking about using it as inspiration for my contribution to the jam. The novel takes place in a post-apocalyptic world that was brought about by nuclear war, and the remainder of humanity was so abhorred and scarred from the exchange that they regressed technology willfully, basically making all engineering and science forbidden. Much later, as humanity begins to rediscover these topics, any surviving technical manuals and academic texts are studied by religious orders and regarded as sacred relics.
I find that idea fascinating and I'm thinking about doing something related to this. That setting is very interesting to me, and perhaps the object can be a technical manual, passed down through generations and different monastic orders of proto-engineers and scientists as they delve deeper into it, figuring out how to apply it chapter by chapter. Maybe the agents represent different disciplines, who see value in the manual from their own perspectives and fields.
Neat concept! Very different from anything I've read so far. Questions that popped up after reading your example:
- Is the manual complete? Is it ancient, containing old languages or archaic text?
- is it a manual in the technical sense, containing schematics? More like an encyclopedia, or a creed?
- Can Agents add, change or remove sections in/from the manual?
If you go down the route of the religious aspects you mentioned in your inspiration example:
- Does such a manual leave its contents open to interpretation?
- Can the content be misinterpreted, in any way, and if so, to what extent ?
- Can it be spawn a religious offshoot or sect? Can it unify people? End wars? Start crusades?
Not trying to push you into going down a certain path or anything, I'm merely pondering the ramifications of your specific example!
Ooooooh, those are some really good questions that I want to address!
- Whether the manual is complete or not, I'm not sure. I think that it could start complete, but then it could get altered, either with additions or redactions. I think it would be really interesting to add an element of knowledge being censored and outright removed by the Agents, and then this has an effect on consecutive loops. Sort of like how concrete use was widespread until the fall of the Roman empire and then was very rarely used until the technology was redeveloped in the industrial revolution.
- The question if the manual has schematics is a good one. I'm struggling to imagine how to incorporate an element of drawing into the game, to be honest. Straight-up drawing schematics might be too daunting, and making a drawing of just the cover of the manual sounds trivial. Thoughts? My thinking goes along the lines of a manual for car repair, for instance, or a manual for electronics soldering, things like this with practical applications that can be used in a myriad of scenarios (not to limit the players).
- The idea of the contents of the manual being misinterpreted is also intriguing, although I think that instead of misinterpretation I would be more inclined towards misuse. What if they figure out that a particular technology that could be used for good is instead used for bad? Could this also feed into consecutive loops, meaning that a previous iteration has an impact on the attitude of the next Agents, actually becoming the inspiration or motivation to add or redact content?
- I think the last point is one that could be further developed into an ending. I think I've got a tenuous idea for the start and the loop, but I haven't given a lot of thought to the end. I like the idea of the Object having an ultimate consequence. Maybe the start of the game establishes a conflict that may be solved (either positively or negatively) by the Object's travel through the loop.
Cool cool cool! Very curious to see this develop!
Re: the schematics. If you want to pursue this , I'd say make it into a very basic subsystem, nothing too fancy. Provide players with some very basic shapes and symbols that communicate different interpretations of a schematic that can be combined or altered. Agents add their own layer of symbols/shapes through some kind of oracle system or table generation? Like you said, it's not about simulating real schematics, but emulating change over time. Given that this is a 3 week jam though, there is a danger of it succumbing to feature creep.
Not sure if this helps, but I did come across this thing: Sigil Generator by watabou (itch.io)
I love the Canticle! I like your idea - I think you could make it even broader and have it focus on a wide variety of people / orgs rediscovering technology or culture from the old world, seeing how they use and interpret it. While the monastic focus is cool, you could also include luddites, kings, warriors, monsters, regular people, etc.
Depends on what you're going for, of course.
Oh yeah! I only used the monastic example because that's the one I remember from the novel, however I think that indeed, there can be a multitude of factions that could interact with the manual. I think this could open it up to having specific factions that would be either positive or negative towards its content, too!
So I'm twisting the idea around a little bit after watching The Green Knight twice and having lots of Arthurian/myth-making thoughts which come with being a big medieval poetry fan, I guess. Taking my liberties with the SRD but hey, why not?
The Object for my game is the mythic antagonist in these kinds of stories who basically does not have agency outside of the eventual myths of the Agents (which I'm currently calling Challengers, but we'll see), and all you can do is basically decide whether to deem them worthy or unworthy of the story, striking them down or not.
So it'll be about two things: individual agents and the decay of a fantasy kingdom over time. I'm taking "not having agency" here very broadly as being unable to make choices in a story that don't just contribute to, you know, making a myth out of someone else.
Definitely debating this at the moment. On one hand, I worry about too much complexity over time if people aren't removed from the strands of the narrative, so to speak, but I do like the option to revisit them.... Perhaps a neat little optional mechanic?
(Or feature creep is happening right now, as I type!)
I was thinking of writing something about old cars and legacy vehicles that get passed through different hands ('Vehicles' and 'Drivers'). Every Driver has their adventures with the Vehicle but eventually retires from disinterest or dies from recklessness. It's my first game jam so I'm having trouble nailing down what I want.
I also have an idea about mechas like how Titanfall's BT had a core with its own personality and protocols.
I'm super-late to the party (and my first-ever jam), but I'm planning on making my entry focus on Musical Instruments (I actually have an idea for a suite of musical-themed L&F games), as they pass on from musician to musician! It opens up a whole can of worms for time-frames and settings, but I also think it would allow a playthrough to go from the Renaissance all the way up to modern-day, and beyond (ideas/tips/tricks/thoughts welcome)
just found out about this jam and am already so excited about it and all ideas in here are sounding awesome!
I'm thinking of a game about city buildings and architectural styles, so doing playbooks like The Brutalist, The NeoClassical, The ArtNouveau, The Post-Modern etc and the agents being like possible uses/functions (city hall, hospital, school, church, department store, prison, big-shady-internet-company warehouse)
Someone mentioned a recipe; what about a song, legend, prophecy, or breed of plant or animal?
Would the evolution of a new breed of sheep count, so you'd follow each successive lamb rather than an immortal sheep?
If a song changes over time, then someone digs up the original, which version does the song see as the "true" version?
When a prophecy comes true, does it die? When humans think it has come true, does it feel the same way?
I had an idea before but I have my actual idea now: Every Room A Mouth.
EVERY ROOM A MOUTH invites the player to step into the shoes of a house—watchful, rotten, and full of hate—that will never be a home, as it seethes and growls and feeds on mortal flesh and tragedy. You’ll feel the centuries bear down upon you as horror festers in your heart, walls crumbling and roof sagging as you wait for your next victim.
It’s all about haunted houses, baybee!