The moment you have all been waiting for! With just about a week to go before the jam begins, we are delighted to bring you the GGJ 2023 Diversifiers!
We hope that they will spark your creativity to start thinking of ideas you could apply to your GGJ games. GGJ is a multicultural event by its nature so for GGJ 2023 we have added Cultural diversifiers as a category that were suggested by our community members. These relate to specific aspects of their culture or events currently happening in their part of the world.
We could not have come up with this awesome list without your submissions. A big thanks our Diversifier Committee for going through all of them and selecting the final list for GGJ 2023: Adam Clewes-Boyne, Charly Harbord, Gustavo Dort, Ian Hamilton, Oleksii Izvalov, Teppo Kauppinen, Tim Cullings, and Yadu Rajiv.
Diversifiers are a great way to add more fun or a challenge to your jam weekend. Sometimes they can be very helpful to limit your scope or refine your ideas. They are totally optional constraints you can choose to add to your GGJ game alongside the main focus of the theme. It can help your game stand out from the crowd, and you can choose up to 4 when you submit! This year's diversifiers will also be available in other languages, which will be linked to this post as soon as they are ready.
العربية, Azerbaijani, български, Burmese, Català, čeština, Croatian(hrvatski), Deutsch, Español, Filipino, Français, Ελληνικά, עברית, bahasa Indonesia, Italiano, 日本語, 한국어, Latviešu, valoda, فارسی, Polski, Português brasileiro, Română, русский, српски, 简体中文, 繁體中文, ภาษาไทย, Türkçe, українська мова, Urdu.
Sponsored
Making Memories (Sponsored by dot big bang): Create a game that has at least one moment that everyone who plays it will remember. It could be something delightful, a jumpscare, an epic climax, an epiphany, but make it memorable!
Dungeon Master (Sponsored by coherence): Use the Unity Editor as a mechanic or tool in your game! One player can join from the editor at any time to affect the world in a way ordinary players can't, e.g. move and drop in world elements and NPC's to mess with a live multiplayer session.
Entries using coherence multiplayer are eligible for a $10,000 prize pool. More info: https://coherence.io/ggj.
The World Is A Better Place With More Creators In It (Sponsored by Unity): Build a game where the player commands a large group of characters, or many players play together, to achieve an objective.
YAHAHA Multiplayer Challenge (Sponsored by YAHAHA): Use the YAHAHA Studio Platform to create a game that is suitable for multiplayer or social scenarios for your Global Game Jam entry. Entries created in YAHAHA are eligible to win part of a $15,000 prize pool. Find out more at https://yahaha.com/events/globalgamejam
All Your Base (Sponsored by Google Firebase): Supercharge your games with Firebase. Build, release, and operate successful games that delight your players. Check out these helpful links to get Firebase into your games: Understand your game's crashes using advanced Crashlytics features, Use Remote Config to update your Unity game without a release, Build robust, distributed leaderboards with Cloud Firestore.
Hidden Heritage (Sponsored by UK Games Fund/Tranzfuser): Please only use this diversifier if you are a team based in the UK. Select a local landmark or place of cultural / historical interest (it can be fact, fiction, myth or legend) close to your team’s physical location (in the UK) and use it as inspiration for your game idea. The final game can be set in the past, present or brought into the future, but it should look to raise awareness about a local regional treasure, sparking interest across a wide and varied audience. Find out more here https://tranzfuser.com/global-game-jam-ukgtf-diversifier/
Give your NPCs a brain, or even a heart (Sponsored by Inworld): What if your NPCs had knowledge, motivation and personality? What if your quest giver has a lot more to give? What if the princess doesn’t want to be saved? Surprise and delight players with AI-powered NPCs you create with natural language, then easily integrate them into your Unity, Unreal or node.js project. If you enjoy jamming with Inworld, you could get up to $50K for your project - details at inworld.ai/grants
Defeat Disinfo (Sponsored by Global Engagement Center: US Department of State): Create a game that teaches media literacy and how to spot disinformation.
Cubes + Lua (Sponsored by Cubzh): Use Cubzh to create your game! The dev team will be available throughout the jam on Discord in the #cubzh if you need help. We’ll showcase your games after the event, the best ones will win part of a $2000 prize pool.
Old Meets New (Sponsored by CrazyGames): Make a web game inspired by any of the great classic Flash games while giving it an inspired modern twist with io multiplayer, clicker, or hypercasual mechanics. All developers participating in GGJ2023 can submit their jam game to CrazyGames.com for the chance to win a publishing deal and 5,000 EUR minimum guarantee. Submit your game with #GGJ in the description to enter. If you have any questions, contact us and include “GGJ” in your message, or @ us on Twitter.
Sharing Is Caring (Sponsored by GitHub): Share the source code for your submission in a public GitHub repository and list the URL on your submission page.
Bring Your Players to Life (Sponsored by Avaturn): Create a game that leverages players' personalized avatars into a truly immersive and engaging experience. explore new ways to incorporate avatars into gameplay and storytelling. Bonus points for allowing players to further personalize their avatars with unique clothing, accessories, and color options. Show us how you're using player personalization to take your game development to the next level and bring your players to life.
Accessibility
Express Yourself: Make a game in which the main input(s) are done through facial expression
Caption Contest: 2023 is the 30th anniversary of subtitling in games. Your game has text equivalents for both speech and important sounds.
Zen: Game has no intense visual effects or sounds, or lets players adjust intensity
Art
Tour Guide: The art of your game showcases cultural aspects of places you like.
Representation Matters: Have multiple options for the appearance of the main character, such as gender identity, race, height, age, disability, etc.
Over 9000 Hours: All of your art assets have to originate in default MS Paint, and stay as MS Paint Driven as possible in your pipeline - you may export a "Final" MS Paint asset to software that lets you export transparent backgrounds - but art should be as MS Paint centric as possible. Or use the open source version https://paint.js.org/
Audio
Kazoog: The music of your game must be played on the kazoo instrument.
Proximity Effect: Make all of your game music using only objects that are in close environment (for example, tapping pen on table to create a beat, etc).
Synesthesia: Use painting accessories, programs and paintings themself to make music / design sounds
Code
Shake 'N Bake: Include the use of gyroscopes and accelerometers in your game.
Off the Beaten Track: Use an open source game engine that is not well known.
No Shortcuts: Create the game without using ready -made engines and libraries dedicated to creating games.
Cultural
Woman, life, freedom: A popular revolution is forming and growing in Iran. "Woman, life, freedom" and "man, homeland, settlement" are the main slogans of the Iranian people in this revolution. Be a supporter of the peaceful Iranian people by making creative games based on one of these slogans.
Prehispanic: Your story takes inspiration from the myths of prehispanic South & central American cultures: Aztecs, Mayans, Olmecs, anything older than 1400!
Year of the Rabbit: Make a game that has rabbits as an element in it, or showcases how your culture/locals celebrate the Year of the Rabbit, or make a game featuring cats for our Vietnamese friends who are celebrating the Year of the Cat.
Slava Ukraini: Recognize the struggle of the Ukrainian nation for freedom by using the shades of blue and yellow in your game palette
Design
Couch Potato: Your game must implement couch local multiplayer (co-op or versus). Ideally featuring potatoes.
An Image Is Worth 1,000 Words: Make a game that has no text.
A Friend In Need: Implement a character that aids you in your goal in the game.
Meta
New Friends Along the Way: Make a game in a team where none of the members have ever collaborated with each other before. Bonus if all of you were strangers before the jam.
The Great Outdoors: At least 50% of your game was created outdoors. Include picture(s) of you or your team jamming outdoors. How you define outdoors is up to you.
The Number 23: It’s 2023. The number 23 represents change, progress, innovation, new beginnings, revolution, and transformation. Integrate one or more of these themes into your game.
Narrative
Creature Feature: Create a game that is played through the eyes of any non-human creature.
Once upon a 404...: Create a game that focuses or centers on the disappearance of information surrounding historical events and/or stories of underrepresented communities.
Is this the end?: Make a game with multiple endings.