Hi everyone! You all have great themes going on. Can't wait to see what you come up with. The one idea that pop-up when I was reading the SRD is: 

You are a horror novel writer with an history of mental illness. Your editor has been begging you for a fourth book but you've been battling the blank page syndrome and a bad case of the booze for a couple months now. Your spouse had a great idea: "Why don't you go to my parent cabin in Maine to focus on the book? Alone, with your thoughts, in the woods, nothing can go wrong. Heck! You might even breathe some fresh air." You will write that DAMN book even if it drives you mad or you drink yourself in a coma or both... 

Inspired by movies like: In the Mouth of Madness, Secret Window, Misery, The Shinning 

But I still haven't started writing it yet... So wish me luck! :-)  

I have two ideas, one that will be up in a day or two, and the other I am not sure if I will finish in time for the Jam, but will be getting made eventually regardless.

1. The Buried. You are a miner who survives a cave in. Only, you now find yourself in a strange system of tunnels that no human hand dug. Introducing a mechanic for darkness...basically you have a limited number of charges for your headlamp, and you choose when to use it (each charge is good for one card). If a card has the darkness modifier, you have to pull twice. There will be ways to add to your charges (one of the Aces for example).

2. The Forlorn Hope. There were military units called Forlorn Hopes. Basically they got double the pay (unless they were convicts being forced to join), but got sent on all the suicidal missions like being the first wave to attack the walls. Young officers would take the risk leading them however, because if you lived you were sure to move up the ranks. So you'll be playing a young officer trying to keep as many of your men alive as possible, and staying alive yourself, for the duration of the campaign.

They say write what you know. This is what I know. Hopefully, this does not turn out to be desperately boring.

You are a project manager of some experience. 

Which is why you are worried

Your company has asked you to “just get us started” on a substantial project, though the final contract terms have not been settled.

Madness

You have warned them that this is a bad idea, but management insists. They explain they are confident that you can handle it.

You know the odds are not in your favor

Project managers can ask, but they cannot compel. Their greatest strength comes from speaking truth in meetings. 

Document everything.

I've already submitted BLOOM, a game about girls at a boarding school being mutated by a disease called the Tox, based on the book Wilder Girls, but I'm currently working on three more!!

Changeling: A standard Wretched & Alone game in which you play a changeling who's body is failing. The tower represents your body finally collapsing into sap and wicker, the kings represent a mob coming after you after someone in your town figures out what you are. The suits (tentatively so far) are Memories (of the feywild, your birth/construction, your passage into the human world, and the "real you" being kidnapped by the fey), Relationships (friends, family, and foes, including romantic options because I just can't help myself lol), Body (your changeling body failing in specific ways, becoming more obviously non-human, having to avoid people seeing the ways in which you aren't human, and your changeling tells causing you problems), and... I'm not sure about the fourth suite?? WIP.

The Kissing Game: A deviation from the standard W&A model, this game has no lose/win conditions and really only qualifies as a Wretched Jam game because I use many of the same mechanics for it. It's a game about self-love verging on narcissism in which you perform tasks like writing love letters to yourself, staring at yourself in a mirror, and kissing yourself in a mirror, among other things!

Steal Marry Kill: Another deviation from the standard W&A games. This game is designed to accompany a workout routine I call "The Viking Workout," in which you pretend to be a viking raiding one or more small villages. The game rewards you by instructing you to roll a die after each workout and draw that many cards to see what loot you obtain! Diamonds represents precious treasure like gold and jewels, Spades are general goods and equipment and useful items, Clubs are livestock and foodstuffs, and Hearts are beautiful women that desire to fling themselves adorously into your strong viking arms! This game has no win/lose mechanics and no end, and is just designed to be a fun addition to a fun exercise routine!

omg so i started working on another game idea bc rip me

it takes place over a week/weekend, so i'm considering a few different things for the cards:
1. each of the suits represents a time of day (morning, afternoon, evening, and night), or
2. each round is a time of day (morning, afternoon, evening, and night) instead of a day, and instead of pulling 1d6 cards, you pull one of each suit

not sure what the suits would represent in #2 yet. maybe location, emotion... idk. it feels very half-formed right now

So, I've already submitted "The Artifact" which stays fairly close to the original Wretched & Alone template, with one little twist around using a joker to extend the story.  After reading through some of the other posts in this thread, I've got a few more ideas, and I think I'd like to develop at least one more of them before the time runs down on this game jam. They all play with the rules/idea of the game in different ways. 

1. Hunter/Hunted - The idea behind this game is to have you switch perspectives halfway through. You start as an assassin stalking your target, and when you inevitably fail, the assassin's guild sends someone after you, and you basically play the game again, but this time you are the one fleeing from the assassins.

2. I don't have a good name for this one yet, but it plays with the idea of the unreliable narrator.  Here's the overview: you are investigating a conspiracy theory, and it is much easier to win the game than usual. However, when you get to the end and "win", you discover that the conspiracy you have been obsessing over is invented and not true at all.

3. You Are A Volcano - In this game, you are literally a volcano. You recently emerged from beneath the ocean to form a volcanic island, and some people have settled on you. Each "day" is about 100 years, and for each day you would draw one card of each suit, representing things like cultural developments, technological developments, weather/climate/geological patterns, threats to society, etc. and describe how the society that has settled on you deals with/incorporates those four things. Your goal, as the volcano, is to find a way to relieve the pressure that is building up in you before you explode and wipe out this little civilization. The tower would represent catastrophic eruption, not sure about the Kings yet - maybe they abandon the island? I'm thinking about ways to make the pulls from the tower work in this situation, and maybe make it a bit more winnable? Or, like the Downfall RPG, maybe the point is to build the society before destroying it?

I'm really leaning towards doing the Volcano one. That seems like a fun challenge to me,

-B

So, after releasing two W&A games for the jam, we thought we were done but....... We're thinking about trying to get another one ready before the end?

The idea we're playing with right now is to implement social media interaction - as in, you'd do your journaling on twitter by using the game's hashtag, and there could be positive or negative triggers for interacting with other posts?

We're still debating between making an optimistic game (the Earth is being visited by extraplanar creatures who judge civlizations and wipe them out if they're not good enough... And they have found Twitter. So the only way to push them away is by sharing good memories and deeds and things worth fighting for, in a sort of Doctor Who-inspired vibe?) or making a creepy game (inspired by social media conspiracy theories/Save Marina Joyce, and using the hashtag to help the next people who are being hunted by whoever we decide is hunting the players)

Hi, I only just discovered that Game Jams have message boards and I wanted to comment here.

This is the first Game Jam I have officially entered, and I was drawn in by the hopeless aspect of the game’s themes.

I have one concept and it is based on a short story I wrote in 2016 about a potential possibility where all Palestinians and Jewish peoples are expelled from the earth on a colony ship due to the racism and bigotry of those in hegemonic powers after it was determined that we were no longer valuable as a tool to appeal to white Christian zionists. This is a very personal story to me as a Palestinian and extremely niche, and I don’t expect it to be incredibly popular.

Withered On The Vine: The game starts off with my short story where an unnamed Palestinian man and his Jewish friend Eli are accompanied by their grandchildren/greatgrandchildren to see the arboretum of the colony ship while the two old friends reflect on the circumstances that resulted in them being on the ship in the first place and how it could have been avoided, while the children talk avidly about the colony that the old men will never see. I thought about changing it so that the elderly Jewish man in the story was also nameless to allow more ambiguity between who is who in the short, but I named the character after my friend Eli and decided I wanted to leave it in.

The game begins with an explosion, a ship crashes into operations section of the colony ship and everyone on board rushes to civilian quarters, except for one of the two elderly friends, they are trapped inside the operations section and they need to be rescued, but the only one who knows to look for them is their other friend. This is where the game starts.

Create your character- you are an elderly Palestinian or Jewish person, male, female, or non-binary, between the ages of 65 and 90. You have been on this ship for the past 50 years. You had a job before you were on the ship that fits into one of 6 categories and you had a job since you got onto the ship that fits into one of 4 categories.

Create your friend- Your friend is an elderly Palestinian or Jewish person (the option you find;t choose for your character), male, female, or non-binary, between the ages of 65 and 90. They have been on the ship for the past 50 same as everyone else and they had a job before they were on the ship that fits into one of 6 categories and they had a job since they got onto the ship that fits into one of the 4 categories.

Record your first journal entry talking about the first time you and your friend met and then begin drawing cards.

The game plays out that you are trying to locate your friend while also trying to stop the actions of an agent sent by earth who is now trying to destroy the operation of the ship, while also trying to avoid being caught by the agent. I am not sure entirely how I want it to work but I am including a 52 card deck with two additional cards, the black, and red joker. The black joker represents your friend and the red joker represent the agent. If you pull the agent card without being prepared for them, with your friend as a team (you can only be prepared for them if one of you has one of the two job categories from before then ship that don’t exist from the time on the ship and having a discussion about your plan) the game is over as you will be overpowered and eliminated by them. If you pull the black joker without fulfilling the prerequisites, then you find that your friend has been taken out by the agent or one of his sabotages.

Odd-numbered cards in the deck represent problems that the agent is causing to the ship’s systems with each different suit corresponding to a category of jobs on the ship. When you pull a card you have to pull from the Jenga tower to represent the deteriorating condition of the ship unless you have experience in the job category from either before the ship or while you were on the ship. Even number cards count as your efforts to find a friend with you needing to pull two pairs before the black joker in order to save your friend. Each time you pull cards you have to choose whether you are searching for your friend, solving problems, or hiding. If you are searching for your friend you don’t get to offset ship damage with prior experience as you are focussed on your friend. If you are solving problems then you don’t get to keep any even-numbered cards you draw. If you choose to hide and the red joker is drawn you don’t get eliminated, but you also don’t get to solve problems that round or save even cards. I read above that there was the idea of using multiple oracle decks and I like the sound of that. I think I want to do that as well, but I have to puzzle out how to do that.

For the journaling aspect of the game, I want it to be audio recordings, basically, the friend who is searching is recalling the events of their friendship and recording it in case neither of them survives or incase only one of them survives. The friend that is searching is hoping that the friend they are searching for will be able to hear it eventually. The recordings act as a way to move the story along but can also benefit the player if they come across something that they couldn’t normally handle in the problems. The recording happens during the searching/problem-solving phase. During the problem-solving phase if the friend that is searching can recall an event similar to this in the two friends’ past then they can borrow their friend’s skills to solve one of those problems without pulling from the tower. If during the searching phase the friend that is searching can recall a moment that challenged or strengthened the two friends’ connection to one another then they can negate one of the problem cards.

The game ends when more than half the ship’s systems have been compromised and the colony is left to drift in space, when the friend that is searching is incapacitated by the agent, or when the two friends stop the agent together. The last possibility is extremely unlikely and also not a true win condition because unless the friends can make it seem like the agent succeeded then earth will just send another, so if one of the two friends do not have the second of the two categories of jobs not found on the ship in order to trick earth.

The point of this game is that surviving as marginalized stateless people is nearly impossible, but it is absolutely impossible if you think that you can do it alone and that the greatest allies for the Palestinian and Jewish people are each other. It is a very heavy game topic especially considering it deals with issues of genocide and ethnic cleansing, but it is one I want to tell as a Palestinian.

So like the true ADHD kid I am, I heard a song on the radio and have started YET ANOTHER game.

In this one instead of journaling you draw a map which I think is pretty cool. (I mean technically you could totally still journal if you wanted to, but, you know, I thought something different would be fun.)

It's called If the World Was Ending You'd Come Over Right? and it's about how the world is literally going to end in a few days and when you were young/younger you made a pact with your best friend/crush/lover about how if the world ever ended you'd spend your last day together, in that jokey way people do, and you decided to honor that. So you go to their last known address and get into their apartment.

And I was thinking, maybe two-player? Or you spend your last days with them as an NPC? But then I thought — no, you get there and they're gone. And the game is you and your friend's apartment and all their stuff at the end of the world. So the game is you remembering the times you had and what could have been (if things hadn't gone wrong between you and/or if the world wasn't ending) and going through their stuff and smelling their clothes and pillow because who cares the world is ending.

The tower represents the air quality going to shit and you suffocating. The Kings are going to be random things like another bomb going off, the building collapsing, idk I'll think of a few more. I'm going to write the Aces like the Kings, where if you draw all four, your friend comes home, and the last Ace you draw determines how they react to you!!! I'm really excited about that idea.

I definitely want to balance out the existential crisis impending doom feeling of this game with the feeling of being on a sort of treasure hunt, discovering things about your friend you never knew, and things that have happened to them since you parted ways. And part of that will be labeling stuff on the map, like the lock box you found under the bed, the violin in the corner ("do they play now?"), the tuna sandwich in the fridge ("but they hate tuna???"), stuff like that.

The hearts suite is going to be an optional NSFW portion of the game that you can remove if you don't want to use it. So if you're in a safe environment and feel comfortable, you can turn it into a very sexy game of pretending to be in your ex-lover's bed pretending they're there with you (and maybe drawing the Ace of Hearts if you're REALLY lucky). (;

UPDATE: I've decided to do TWO Hearts tables! One NSFW and one SFW, so removing cards from the deck isn't necessary, and people who don't want to engage in sexual content can still experience the fun of questions like "what do they smell like?" and "did you ever crawl into their bed to be comforted during a thunderstorm?" Also I couldn't think of a fourth topic so both Spades AND Clubs are "Stuff." HUZZAH.

I added a New Game+ mode to Hope is not a Plan in order to make each subsequent game easier. With some feedback from Matt (thank you Matt!), decided to remove one card from the deck for each previous game, make the token die roll easier each time, and starting on your third game, you begin with Ace of Hearts in play automatically.

I just discovered this engine and game jam with the Racial Justice bundle, and I immediately have a idea, but I don't know that I'll be able to get a full polished game ready in time for the jam to be over - is it acceptable to submit a game in early alpha state, with the intent to go back to it afterwards?

Anyways, this idea just popped into my head over the weekend. It's part Norse Mythology (heavily inspired by the Poetic Edda  and Joanne Harris' Gospel of Loki) and part also about living a life where you feel you have to suppress part of yourself in order to avoid angering people who you rely on for your well being, and finally giving in to that wild desire to scream and rail at them and rub your identity in their faces, consequences be damned. Haven't written any mechanics yet, but this is what I wrote when I was nailing down the idea:

It was never going to last...
You were too different, too strange, too wild.
Only tolerated as long as you were useful, as long as they could pretend you were tamed
But you are wildfire, and you could never hide your true nature for long.

Tonight, you overstepped
Revealed too much truth
Stripped away the pretty picture they had painted of you
Forced them to come to terms with the messy whole of you

FUCK THEIR EXPECTATIONS

You saw it in their eyes the moment it happened
Saw the fury that burned their tenuous goodwill to ashes

They'll never forgive you
So now you run, hoping that you can gather enough scraps of good will to build a shelter against the storm of their rage.

Because you will not like what they have in mind for you if they catch you...

My contribution will be “Below 459”. It takes place on a West German submarine in 1968 that drifts in the Baltic Sea. The boat is severely damaged, so the player has to wait for a rescue team. What they don’t know is if they have already crossed the Iron Curtain or not.

I really loved the mechanic in Disco Elysium where the player character is defined by their choice of thoughts and want to implement something similar. Some cards will prompt the player to come up with pro communist or pro capitalist thoughts, thus shaping the mind of the character being rescued. If you survive, you have to flip one last card. A red suit indicates a communist rescue team, a black one a capitalist one. If the player’s choice of alignment matches those of the rescue team they won, otherwise they will be imprisoned. This doesn’t really count as winning the game, does it?

Hey all! Getting to this thread a bit late for it, but I'm just putting out my Mars-based W&A game today. I have a few other random ideas kicking around, but nothing has sprung up as "a project" yet. The only thing I had put any thought into was creating a game for both the Wretched Jam as well as the Fucked Up Guy Jam. Not sure what that looks like yet, but I feel like the two jams go hand-in-hand.