October: the month when everyone starts thinking about Halloween, which is conveniently right at the end of the month. So month-long game jams ending then seem almost obligatory — it’s a good length for a longer game jam, and comes with an overall theme, too.

I don’t participate much in game jams, preferring to just work on games with a massive scope and never get close to a shippable game 🤪 but this might be a good time to start, even if I’m a couple of days late.

Ideas/Themes

  • Wolves

    • Shadowy wolves, perhaps mainly red eyes

  • Light, shadow

    • Enemies only move while they’re in shadow, and you carry a torch (either kind)

    • Obviously the light has to be flickering/inconsistent 😈

  • Not being able to see behind you

    • In a 3D game, not being able to see behind you is a given.

    • But in a 2D top-down game, having a limited field of vision is oddly terrifying, where you can only see in the direction of your cursor.

  • Other monsters

  • Night

    • An extension of shadow, actually

    • To state the obvious, scary because 1. it’s harder to see things (and thus anticipate attacks and protect yourself), and 2. many natural predators hunt at night.

  • Post-apocalyptic

    • A war-torn post-nuclear war setting gives rise to a setting where you can have mutants and such. Think bigger than Fallout!

  • Abandoned facilities

    • Schools, malls, outposts

    • Obviously not quite abandoned!

  • Combat vs non-combat

    • Nothing quite as daunting as being chased by something and being defenseless against it (Alien: Isolation)

    • Combat can still be fun, but is a subgenre shift

  • Phobias…​

    • Most common phobias, more common phobias

    • Most of those wouldn’t translate well to a game (unless you’re trying to literally traumatize the player)

    • Some that might work include arachnophobia (who doesn’t love spider enemies), claustrophobia (if the game is 3D), or fear of heights (walking along a narrow path). Still, even these are about mortal survival, which is hard to capture in a game.

  • You are the monster

    • Not unlike Carrion.

    • But that’s not scary! Unless there are other bigger scarier monsters.

    • Imagine if you’re a monster part of a bigger hivemind, but somehow you gain independent sentience. Humans (your prey) still try to kill you. The hivemind is also trying to kill you, the "heretic".

Generated Ideas

I stumbled upon Game Jam Theme Generator got some interesting ideas from there:

  • Parasite

    • I like this one. The notion of some macroscopic living thing inside you is so…​shudder utterly unnerving. The first (and fairly extreme) example of this that comes to mind is the scarab scene from The Mummy.

  • One Level, But Constantly Changing

    • I’ve been leaning towards this idea of a top-down game where you’re in a forest trying to escape a stalking wolf at night, protected only by your flashlight and the shadows of trees. With Constantly Changing, perhaps the trees could be moving in and out of existence. Like if you aren’t looking at it, they move.

  • Beneath the Surface

    • Trapped underground trying to escape? What if things are collapsing around you? Might not even be a time-pressure thing, but like…​you can’t go back because things break behind you.

  • Death Is Only The Beginning

    • One way to interpret this is in the Dark Souls way where you don’t reload when you die, you just go to an alternate plane for a bit and come back. But in general, I personally don’t like where the game means for you to die repeatedly.

    • Another way to interpret this is you’re actually deceased for most of the game. Are you a ghost, come back to haunt the living? Or are you a ghost in the afterlife? You’re dead, but keep playing.

  • Parallel Dimensions

    • Classic mindbender is to force the player to interact with multiple realities concurrently. Perhaps the player could pull a Danny Phantom and alternate between alive and dead?

  • Indirect Interaction

    • This one’s a little vague, but I like the idea of escaping enemies by interacting with the environment. Knocking down boxes to slow their pursuit, for example.

  • You Are Not Supposed To Be Here

    • More abandoned facility fun times.

    • Or perhaps you’re alive, but in the land of the dead.

  • Alone

    • This one’s pretty much a given.

    • But how alone? Last human on Earth alone?

    • Stranded in the middle of the ocean alone?

    • Woken up after 1000 years in stasis with no one around alone? Either on earth or in deep space.