As all of you wait for the theme to be announced, here is something to get your creative mind already working: A list of additional design constraints – The Global Game Jam 2015 Diversifiers!
The GGJ Diversifier list is aimed at providing additional starting point for the game jam games. They can help you focus and choose interesting directions for your game project and add extra challenge for the experienced jammers. The GGJ Diversifiers is a free-for-all voluntary list of secondary constraints, that the individual teams can choose to go for, or not, as they please. If they do go for one or more diversifiers, they get to tick off them as fulfilled when uploading their game. The use of the diversifiers as part of your game project is absolutely voluntary. If you are a first time team of students, we recommend that you focus primarily on the overall constraint (the theme and the time), and only add in extra diversifiers if you feel sure you will have something to hand in on Sunday.
Our GGJ 2015 Diversifier Committee has put together a list of different kinds of additional constraints for different tastes and interests; some of them are more about technical, some about the design and some about style, art or audio. There are also diversifiers for those of you, who would like to jam for a cause! Check out the list and use them for set challenge or just for the inspiration!
- Noise Generator: The mechanic of the game is based on players having to stay in constant communication with each other.
- Folk: The game uses a folk or indigenous art style of your region.
- NES: Make the game playable on an old school console, either directly or through an emulator.
- Wrist Watcher: The game is playable on a smart-watch, or uses wearable technology in some way.
- Clueless Parents: The game helps kids teach something to their parents or other family members.
- Batch Job: The game is a batch file from any operating system, using command line tools found in an out of the box installation.
- Chimera: The game is played partly as a digital and partly as a non-digital (board, card, etc.) game.
- Hyper-Local: The game is set in your town/city and contains elements locals can identify, while still being entertaining for a global audience.
- Can I Try?: Any spectator of the game automatically becomes a player as well.
- This is How it Feels: The game raises awareness of how hate speech or unfair accusations feel, and what kind of effect they have on their targets.
- Stephen Hawking Can Play This: In the game everything (including any menus) can be navigated with one button, without any need for quick / precisely timed presses.
- Eagle Ear: The game is primarily visual, but is also playable by visually impaired players, either through audio design, or through a screenreader (VoiceOver, Talkback, JAWS etc).
- Relatively Speaking: A game based on the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which explained that massive objects cause a distortion in space-time, such as light bending around black holes.
- Public Domain Class of 2015: Make a game based on the works entered to Public Domain on 1st January 2015 - for instance works of Wassily Kandinsky, Edvard Munch, Edith Sitwell, Piet Mondrian, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Felix Nussbaum, Filippo Tommaso Emilio Marinetti, Glenn Miller, Flannery O’Connor, and Ian Fleming (cough, James Bond, cough), depending on your country.
- Code for Good (Sponsored by Intel): Make a game with the goal of improving literacy, or inspiring interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields.
Annakaisa Kultima
Chair, GGJ Theme Committee