Hello and welcome to the BOOM Jam! What is a boom jam? This is a Doom-inspired jam.  In case you aren't familiar, the original Doom video game released back in 1993. It's a first person shooter with an emphasis on gunplay and exploration in order to exit each level and ultimately defeat the final boss, the Cyber Demon. This was "Doom Guy's" goal to save humanity, even though I think most of them already died based on the countless corpses I've passed by throughout the game so I'm not really sure to be totally honest. But with that said the submissions for this jam should have an emphasis on Doom elements, such as:

The Idea:

Story - Any Doom game is pretty much about demons invading humanity, and most of humanity seems to get wiped out by the demons. The player seems to be the only human survivor left but I'm not sure exactly because the story mentions that player is trying to save humanity. Anyway, you can take inspiration from this story and keep it light if you want, but try to be at least a little creative. Passive storytelling is fine.

Weapons - In the Doom series, there are a variety of weapons which the player can use to combat hordes of enemies. These are mostly guns such as pistols, shotguns, rocket launchers, plasma rifles, etc. but for you game, you aren't limited to guns. You can develop whatever weapons you want, so long as there is an emphasis on combat! Maybe you can be an certified dual-wielding swordsman? Just throwing the idea here.

Enemies - In the Doom series, the player typically fights hordes of demons and zombie gunners, but again you are free to experiment. I was thinking it would be cool to have a Bloodborne-inspired shooter game, so maybe you can try beasts.

Levels -  In the Doom series, the levels often involve demon infested corridors with secret walls or locked doors which you need to unlock one way or another. I really enjoyed this style of level design, but if you want to have arena-based levels with just emphasis on combat, that's totally awesome as well.

Items - In the Doom series, there are health and ammo pickups placed throughout each level to keep the player stocked up for more combat encounters. You can try something similar if you want.

Horror - In the Doom series, the levels are littered with human corpses and guts, and whenever the player kills enemies, that adds more guts to the scene. This is totally welcome, but I'd prefer it an a passive sort of way. The emphasis should be on gameplay and fun. Violence is welcome due to the inherent nature of Doom, but I don't think violence should be "promoted" so no torturing your enemies just for psycho entertainment please.

Conclusion:

This is a Doom inspired jam. Hopefully you are familiar at least one of the games so you have a good understanding of what I'm talking about, but either way I'm pretty loose with the rules here because I want people to just have fun, make friends, and learn to develop games. Even though it's Doom-inspired, you can take inspiration from other similar games such as Blood (1997), Heretic (1994), Unreal (1998), or Quake (1996), etc. It doesn't even have to be a 90s shooter game, you can take inspiration from Doom Eternal for example. Anyway that's the gist of the jam details. Also if you aren't familiar, ChatGPT is a sophisticated AI chatbot which I think is super helpful for generating ideas and learning to program. I'm not exaggerating when I say it taught me how to write a card game in C++, so definitely check it out if you haven't. I hope you all have fun and good luck!

Discord Link:  "The Pool Party"