Make a Thing Right Now IV: The Quest for Minimalism

This, for the fourth year in a row, is a jam all about primal, elemental, close-to-the-metal TTRPG (or other similar analog game) creation! No pictures, no layout, all killer, no filler. Fire up google docs or the markdown editor of your choice and go to town!

Before I get any (further) well-actually's, this is for games that are minimalist in a visual sense. Make as complicated a thing as you like mechanically. Or don't. You can also do a card game or something and not explicitly a TTRPG, it's just very much not for video games, for reasons you will discover shortly. The world is your oyster, as long as you follow...

The Rules

This jam will accept entries with the following conditions:

• Make a game with markdown , in plaintext, or one of these templates:
  • IBM Plex Serif
  • Roboto Condensed
  • Atkinson Hyperlegible Mono
  • Lexend
  • Comic Sans
  • If starting with a google docs template (File -> Make a Copy), don't change any fonts or colors. One font, white background, black text is the goal. When your game is done, export as PDF/ePub/etc. (File -> Download -> select the file type.) If starting with markdown, you may use a tool such as pandoc to convert it to a PDF, or just leave it in raw markdown.
  • If you want to use a different word processor, use one of these fonts. They're all free. If you ask me to use another, I will say no.

• No pictures, no drawings, no diagrams. Text only as much as possible!
• No further layout. Keep the page setup as “pageless”. Avoid alignment changes, ASCII pictorial representations, etc. Try not to mess with form too much. The intent is to focus on what's being written, not how it's shaped on the page. Header 1/2/3, bold, italic, ordered/unordered lists, etc. are fine.
• You can make something and add layout, pictures, etc. later. If you do, I would encourage you to wait until after the jam is over to do so. This isn’t a hard-hard requirement but to be perfectly clear, if I see something that blatantly breaks these rules I’m going to throw out your submission.
• In the same spirit, I encourage you to not style any itch page you make for it during the jam, but do what you want! If you do, I suggest you add a cover image of the title or something so it shows up properly on itch and maybe a few choice screenshots.
• Charge whatever you want to for it, including PWYW or nothing at all, and add community copies if you'd like.
  • Bear in mind that this jam isn't a band-aid for the problems of platform discoverability and perceived value without visuals, layout, itch page customization, etc, so I wouldn't expect to strike gold with it...on the other hand, I maintain that very few projects aren't worth at least a few bucks, and at the very least, I hope this jam normalizes for at least a few people that you can make a quality game/etc without all of the trappings.
• No fascists, no racists, no homophobes, no transphobes, etc.

Within those conditions, make whatever you want! A game, a supplement, a setting, a list of characters, plot hooks, you name it. 

Easy Mode

These aren't prohibitions as such, but I'm probably going to side-eye your submission if I see them.

• Weird glyphs. I know you can do a lot of stuff in google docs and there's a lot of weird pictorial stuff in Unicode.  If you didn't know that, now you do. Resist the temptation, if you can. The purpose of this is to focus on written words.
• Page breaks. Some of you are instantly going to ignore the rules I wrote above, make a new document, and page break away to section their work out further. I wouldn't recommend that, as that means you're trying to think about things like fitting into pages rather than the actual text being written. But so it goes.

Hard Mode

These aren't strictly required, but consider trying any or all of the below in addition.

• No tables.
  • Nightmare Mode: No ordered or unordered lists either.
• Keep the amount of expository/prose writing low - aim for like 10% of the work, tops. See what kind of tone, feel, vibe, and themes you can get across with just text as conveyed through mechanics, list choices, etc.
  • Nightmare Mode: None.
• Make a standalone game, framework, supplement, etc. that can be run without any other sourcebook, system knowledge, or etc.
  • Nightmare Mode: Make a fully new game, framework, etc. that isn't directly based on any existing SRD, toolkit, etc. (Inspiration from others is of course fine and good.)
• Keep it truly minimal! Aim for a tiny number of words - like 2000 max.
  • Nightmare Mode: 1000 max.

Ok, but why?

• I want to encourage new developers to start making stuff. If you want to get into game design, comparing your work to lavish products that are the result of crowdfunding campaigns with several-person teams can feel really unfair and intimidating. This jam is a way to encourage those potential new developers: Come up with a thing and put it out there. Make the best game you can within these limitations and worry about the rest later. We're all on the same footing here.
• I want to remind existing developers why they started making stuff. A lot of existing developers (myself included) started off by making something in a google doc or whatever because they got the itch to create something and couldn't let it go. This jam is a way to encourage them to strip away all of the scene-related worries and anxieties about a holistic visual product and try to reclaim that feeling. If you're already a developer, you've definitely got something hanging out on the back burner that you've convinced yourself isn't a priority because there's no time to make it a full production. This is a great opportunity to put it on the front burner and get it out of your head and onto something. Life's too short to lose sight of what brought you to the table. Make A Thing Right Now.

This isn't a ranked jam and as such I'm not going to be rating entries/etc. If you submit a valid entry to this jam, you won! Feel free to contact me (my itch page has my relevant info) and ask me for a download key to anything I've made as a reward.

Resources

• A good guide to markdown/pandoc, if you're planning to go that route and aren't experienced, is here. Ignore the stuff about images and such and don't worry about styling. If you want a more google docs-ish in-browser experience for markdown, I can recommend hackmd.io. When you're ready to bring it to your computer to export via pandoc, there's a download option in the 3-dot menu at the top right.
• Year 1 entries
• Year 2 entries
• Year 3 entries