Just wanted to make a thread where we can discuss how Stage Two is going so far. Since I assume we want as many seed games built upon as possible, some discussion could be helpful.

• When I look at the list of submissions, I can't tell which are Stage 1 or 2, so people can alert in here when they put Stage 2 submissions up if they like. Especially if they want to discuss which stage 1 games influenced them, etc.
• I would love to hear what Stage 1 games people are thinking about hacking. I saw Black Armada's twitter thread on all the Stage 1 submissions. It was great. I'd love to hear more people's thoughts.
• You could also tag Stage 1 Devs here if you want clarification on anything within their games or other discussion. I know I may have questions that come up as I'm working with the seed games.

Would love to hear people's thoughts. Wasn't sure if there was a discord or other source.

I've got a project that's slowly coming together that's inspired by 3+ different seeds (Other Worlds, Southstone, Bury Me in Starlight, maybe a couple others). But I need to get through the end of the academic quarter before I'll have time to finish it up and post it.

I agree that it's a bit confusing to not be able to tell the Stage 1 games from the Stage 2 games.

You can tell when you click on them, it's right at the bottom of each entry. But annoyingly there doesn't seem to be any way to make this visible in the list of submissions.

Stage 2-wise I'm (Josh) working on a game based on the very-popular Other Worlds and Road Goes Ever On, with a dash of Bury Me In Starlight. Will be interesting to see how our entries compare @J Walton!

Come to think of it, order by most recently submitted and you'll get mostly the stage 2 entries. There's one stage 1 entry came in late, but the rest I think are all neatly segregated by the stage 1 deadline date.

@BlackArmada Oh gotcha. Yeah I can see that now. So looks like every submission after mine (Brain Madder) should be Stage 2.

Here's my initial pitch, Josh, in case you're worried: "I'm looking at the seeds for the Refraction Jam while listening to Gorillaz's Demon Days, like ya do, and I think I want to make a game about post-apocalyptic planeswalkers, where they're the "Last Living Souls" setting forth from the last bastion, the small empty castle at the end of everything, but "Every Planet We Reach Is Dead," having all suffered some trans-planar apocalypse. But the planeswalkers have some small tiny missions to fulfill before the heat death of the multiverse. Like carrying their teacher's body back to its home plane for burial. Or delivering a letter that will never be received. Or witnessing and writing a poem about the final quadruple sunrise over the now dried-up seas of Esvesier. Things like that. So it's super depressing, but also filled with these tiny moments of meaning and beauty and camaraderie."

@J Walton not worried at all! I really want to see multiple people building on the same seed, I feel like that's what it's all about (hence the jam title). Our concepts are wildly different, for what it's worth. :)

(Cool concept, too.)

Cool. Yeah, definitely excited to see yours too.

The main idea I'm theoretically working on (once I finish some things I need to get done before the holidays) is something involving making your own Tarot deck. The draw-on-the-cards thing from Other Worlds is an inspiration there, and the current plan is that different players will have some responsibility for each suit of the minor arcana (inspired by Quarterdeck), and you need to create the Major Arcana by doing random TVTropes pages (inspired by All-Devouring Monomythic). I was originally thinking it would be a parallel worlds thing and you'd have a story based around politics and journalism but that felt pretty flat to me, so I'm currently thinking of going in a more supeheroes kind of direction. It will likely have a card-drafting element, like in An Unfinished Draft.  I haven't really written anything down yet, though, and I'm kind of vacillating on whether I think I can make it work.

I have a backup idea, which takes the "simple strategic wargame" thing from A Theoretical Tactics Game and the "your hitpoints are you party" thing from Colander: have a simple light wargame where one player is the Dark Lord and the rest of the players are the Last Alliance, and you play out the battle where the alliance fails to stop the Dark Lord from seizing power, but the process helps do the world- and character-building to set up an Epic Fantasy scenario (e.g. the survivors of the units from the various factions are PCs, or NPCs who learned vital information during the confrontation, etc.). I'm not sure if that's just the setup phase for a game I would design, or if it's kind of like a scenario generation bolt-on for a more conventional RPG.

Also, I think that the situation sketched out in The Body Comes Alive would mesh well with the mechanical structure of my game Rusty from Disuse, but I don't think I'm the right person to write a game like that. I'd be open to collaboration if somebody else was interested, though.

I just released a Stage 2 submission: THESE NEW WORLDS. It extends the card-creation methods of There Are Other Worlds Than These by @ickbat. You create an entire RPG as a group every time you play. Check it out here: https://mstrocks.itch.io/these-new-worlds