Theme: School of Dark Arts

Bonus Challenges: Unlike the Theme, these are entirely optional. Feel free to do one, two, all of them or ignore them completely.

For this game jam, the optional challenges are the following three:

1 - Newcomer: The protagonist is a new student or a new teacher at a school that teaches dark magic to its students.

2 - Disciplinary Action: There's a scene in the game where someone is given some horrifying punishment for breaking the rules.

3 - Dark Ritual: There's a puzzle in the game where the protagonist needs to perform some kind of dark magic ritual correctly.

About the Jam:

RPG Maker has spawned many great horror games and now it's time to create games in the style of these classics! You are welcome to join this jam no matter if you are a beginner or an experienced developer, so long as you want to create a game inspired by traditional RPG Maker horror games. Hopefully, at the end of the game jam you will have something playable you can be proud of!

About the Theme:

A school of dark arts, spoken about only in hushed whispers, open exclusively to the chosen few.

Students are pitted against each other in ruthless competition and only the strongest and most cunning survive long enough to graduate. The teachers are strict, quick to hand out horrifying punishments that weed out the weak and foolish. Dark magic is taught in these halls and horrifying monstrosities are created on a near daily basis.

But perhaps it's not dark magic that is taught at this school. There may be some other skills and knowledge taught there that could be classified as dark arts. Perhaps a school that trains assassins? A secret martial arts academy teaching forbidden techniques? Maybe a university for supervillains? Imagination is the limit!

Whatever horrors the protagonists of your games will encounter during their time spent within this institution's walls, the whole experience will hopefully prove educational!

Discord: Here's the link to the Discord server!

Rules:

- You can only start working on the actual game project after the submission period starts, but you can start planning and creating/gathering assets, plugins and other resources before that time.

- Entries created in any version of RPG Maker are preferred, but you can use any engine or framework, so long as you keep to the spirit of RPG Maker horror games.

- Your game must be a horror game, or atleast have horror elements. It doesn't have to be outright scary, so long as it can even remotely be considered one.

- You can use whatever assets, resources and scripts/plugins you want, so long as you have the rights to use them, abide by their Terms of Use and give credit.

- Your game must incorporate the Theme in some way.

- Abide by itch.io's Terms of Service.

- Suggestions: If you use RPG Maker MV or MZ to make your game, try to include a Browser version of your game if you can. It's not a requirement and you don't have to do so, but you will get a lot more people to play your game if it can be played in a browser.

Art by: Broody Gaming