Toward an social phenomena of artistic intent; welcome to pretentious jam. Please share here, if you so wish, two or more answers to the following:

• What you want to make?
• What text (i.e. any media, fiction or not) that you want to draw from?
• What mediums or tools you want to use and why?
• Why are you scared of participating?
• What is art (not a medium or a strict definition or a single piece; what is the concept?)
• What is not art (not a medium or a strict definition or a single piece; how can something not be art?)
• Who is an artist/group of artists (any medium) you like? How do they influence you?
• ?

None of these need to be commitments. Welcome :)

Thanks for hosting this jam! I'll try to start things off...

What do you want to make?

I am going to make a simple digital toy/game that allows you to ponder an orb. I intend to call it “Orb Pondering Simulator.”

What text (i.e., any media, fiction or not) that you want to draw from?

Two sources provided the inspiration for this project:

• Kenta Cho’s Paku Paku, which has been dubbed “1D Pac-Man.” I appreciate that this probes the absolute minimum of what's required to constitute a “game” – and it’s staggering how little it uses in the way of space, inputs, enemies, and objectives.
• Bennett Foddy’s “Eleven Flavors of Frustration,” specifically this remark: “A game that is completely devoid of frustration is likely to be a game without friction, without disobedience. Games that are perfectly obedient are mere software.” I agree with the sentiment, but I found it interesting how it presupposes that the source of friction should come from within the game. It had me wondering whether friction from outside the game could be a viable source, and set me to thinking that the presumption of playability, when foiled, could perhaps provide that friction. For example, what happens when a game has no need of you – not because it plays itself (cf. beanborg’s Endless Marble Racing), but because it does not necessarily allow itself to be engaged with like a game?

I am also motivated by a series of hermeneutics-related questions that are liable to become their own essay, and I hesitate to try articulating them here for fear of never finishing this post.

What mediums or tools you want to use and why?

I’ll be using PICO-8. It helps keep the scope of the project small, and I find its flavor of Lua a much more comfortable programming language than, say, Python or C.

Why are you scared of participating?

I am a latecomer to coding and game design, and am largely bad at them. Coding is also foreign territory for me in general. I never formally studied programming or computer science, my day job does not involve anything comparable to coding, and I have no friends who code. I’ve never really felt like part of the indie dev community, and I fully expect to embarrass myself.

Hello! I'm really excited for this jam!

What do you want to make?

• I want to make a narrative game! To try and stay within a small scope, it's going to be multiple short scenes that explore different aspects of the same theme before they reach a common conclusion.

What text (i.e. any media, fiction or not) that you want to draw from?

• My two media inspirations for this game are AGUJERO by Nightframes and Adventures with Anxiety! by Nicky Case. The reason both of these games inspire me is because they use every element to create one unified feeling. AGUJERO's art style and UI gives the entire game an alive, pulsing, discomforting feeling that matches its cryptic storyline. It made me scared to keep playing, but I was hooked on the artistry of it. Meanwhile, Adventures with Anxiety! uses the game play to illustrate what anxiety feels like in a way that recontextualizes the illness. That's what I'm trying to draw on for the game play of my entry.
• Outside of that, I'm drawing from my own experience with BPD.

Why are you scared of participating?

• I'm scared I won't be able to finish! At this point, while making a bad art piece is still something that scares me, my biggest worry is I'll have joined this jam and drawn 2 assets for it and completely fall apart once I get to coding. I've given up on so, so many projects before when coding something from scratch and I really don't want it to happen for this project too. My worst fear for this project is a slow death by attrition, especially when my fall college classes kick in next month.

Who is an artist/group of artists (any medium) you like? How do they influence you?

• The German expressionist movement and Fauvism inspired me a lot! Leo Fox and all his comics have also been a huge inspiration. Also, every single artist that makes shitty, shoddily-drawn and overly-personal projects that they finished and released into the world. Forever and always my biggest inspiration.

What you want to make?

I want to make a tribute to 2000s doujin Visual Novels with charming, if stilted, fan translations. It’s going to be melancholic, faux-philosophical in nature, and sort of non-sequitur between cultures and languages lost in translation.

What text (i.e. any media, fiction or not) that you want to draw from?

Many 2000s-2010s VNs, but mainly ef ~a fairy tale of the two~ (and its anime adaptation), Buddhist texts and discourses about reincarnation, and the many stories in the world about various roles in the afterlife.

What mediums or tools you want to use and why?

Visual novel, because I want to explore abstract atmospheric compositions to accompany the text, and it’s more doable than full-blown animation.

Why are you scared of participating?

It’s been a long time since I write ‘properly’ and the narrative in my head is too grand and pretentious, then I just have to overcomplicate things by choosing to also learn a whole new engine, and fitting this to Spooktober deadline.