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.