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❗ Getting Started: Resources, Tips, & Ideas Sticky

A topic by Grim Baccaris created Aug 27, 2018 Views: 524 Replies: 1
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Host (1 edit) (+1)

Hi everybody! I'm your host, Grim; I'm an interactive fiction creator, classicist, and super excited to be hosting another MytholoJam! I'm really passionate about ancient history and making it accessible, and I figured a game jam would be a fun way to get people engaging with antiquity. Here are some resources, tips, and links that might be helpful in creating your project!

🏺 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 it describes.

🏺 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 Theoi Project contains numerous references pages for gods and spirits!

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. Theoi also has a mythic bestiary and information on legendary creatures!

🏺 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 Theseus, a third person VR game promising a new take on the Minotaur myth, and plenty of others out there even from AAA developers, like the upcoming Assassin's Creed Odyssey.

🏺 Other Jams

You're invited to create a game that fits into more than one jam, so long as it's created during the appropriate time for multiple jams and follows all applicable rules. Other jams that might fit well with this one include Yuri Game Jam 2018 (you might want to read — or re-read — some Sappho!), the Bitsy Mixtape Jam, Music Game Jam 2018, or any others that catch your eye and run simultaneously. If you want to see work from previous MytholoJams, check out last year's Greek MytholoJam or the Roman Mytholojam!

🏺 Advice

  • Don’t take on too much — you have two months to work, which is a While, but it’s going to fly by! So I wouldn’t suggest trying to cram a full retelling of the Iliad into this jam or anything. 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. Sometimes that can save a project.
  • Manage your time. This is something I tend to struggle with. It’s okay (and normal) if you can’t work on your project every day of the jam, but try making yourself a timeline to help stay on track so that you know what you need to work on day by day and can avoid getting overwhelmed or crunching. Please don't crunch!
  • 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 project, submit your work! Be proud of what you make! It may not be up to your own expectations, but it’s still something worthwhile.

🏺 Time Management

Important enough to have its own little subsection. Because this Greek MytholoJam is a lot longer than the original or the last Roman variant, a jam-wide extension this time around is very unlikely, and I encourage careful time management even more than before.

The longer you have, the more likely you are to bite off more than you can chew. Organize your days and weeks clearly to maximize your working hours and your time off. Don’t forget to sleep!

🏺 Rules

  • Submissions irrelevant to the theme will be removed. State your project’s relevance to the theme in its description to set it apart from potential spam. No blank submissions!
  • Spam submissions will be removed.
  • Hatred and bigotry will not be tolerated.
  • Any critique of your fellow jammers must be constructive.
  • Similarly, be nice on Discord, and please stay on topic or mostly relevant to jam stuff.
  • Do not start your project before the jam period begins. Concept art and brainstorming beforehand is fine; final assets and code creation is not. This is an honor system thing.
  • Have fun! If you’re not enjoying yourself, take a break and de-stress. If there’s something specific that I can do, please get in touch.

🏺 Team-Building

You can work solo or with others. If you're looking for team members, check out the jam page on CrowdForge, hop into the Discord chat, or make a topic here in the jam community to look for likeminded folks!

🏺 Devlogs

You’re also more than 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?

Refer to the jam overview for a list of Frequently Asked Questions.

If you have other questions about the jam or need help with something, you’re welcome to create a topic in the community or send me an email (to:ricassofiction[@]gmail[.]com).

καλή τύχη! Good luck and have fun!

May I suggest also alot of the videos from the youtube channel "Overly Sarcastic Productions" They have alot of heavily researched content on the ancient greek history and their myths... And they are really enjoyable to watch...


https://www.youtube.com/user/RedEyesTakeWarning