Growing Season is upon us friends! It's time to get out in the garden, get your hands dirty, and make some games.

I encourage you to create games (digital & analogue are both welcome!) that play with actual, real life gardening. Think about the ecosystem where you live, and the challenges it faces. Be proactive and intentional with your gardening. Here are some example ideas that you can steal, or use them as inspiration to come up with your own ideas:

• A game about making & “planting” seed bombs where you play urban wizards trying to bring back magic to your city.
• A game about nutrient fixation in harsh soil played out over a decade planting different crops in the same plot. Each crop has a different story to play out.
• As dystopia rises, you play as assassin gardeners, planting different flowers to send your hits through your network, using bee friendly plants as symbols of revolution.
• A game that tells a story of patience and healing. Over months and years, you plant a forest to sequester carbon as your community locks away memories of horror.
• A game about the passions of snakes, meant to be played following A Cozy Den as spring warms your community. Invite snakes into your gardens to foster a thriving ecosystem.
• A solarpunk PbtA game where the Agendas and Principles are the 12 Principles of Green Engineering.

While this game has an “official” run time, please know that we will literally always take “late” submissions. 

We encourage you to charge for your games. We have the opportunity to set a standard and if you’d like to follow it, you can set the minimum price for your entry as $5 and the suggested price as $10. With that said, we also encourage you to include consideration for those in financial hardship by either including a plaintext copy of your game available for free, or including the following text in your game’s description: “If the price of this game is a hardship to you, please email me at [YOUR EMAIL] or DM me on Twitter [YOUR TWITTER] and I'll get you a download key, no questions asked.”

This jam is hosted by Taylor LaBresh.  Jam photo by Taylor LaBresh, background image by Neslihan Gunaydin on Unsplash.