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The theme for Game Chef 2015 is: A Different Audience
We all write with an audience in mind, whether we’re consciously aware of it or not. For this year’s Game Chef, we invite you to challenge your definition of the audience. What if you intentionally tried to write for an audience you’d never considered before, an audience from a different culture or subculture than your usual gaming group? What if you wrote for an audience that has very different ideas about storytelling? What if your game rules required a literal audience? Or what if you designed for an audience that doesn’t exist yet?
Let the theme inspire you and shape your game as you work on it. You’re free to interpret the theme in any way you want and to have a different interpretation than other competitors. While we’ve attempted to explain the theme, we also invite you to wilfully misinterpret it in whatever way you’d like.
The ingredients for Game Chef 2015 are:
- abandon
- dragonfly
- stillness
- dream
Incorporate 2-3 of the ingredients into your design. Try to incorporate the ingredients as centrally as you can, as part of the premise or the rules or however else makes sense to you. A passing reference is okay if that’s all you can come up with, but we suggest really drawing strongly on the ingredients. Like the theme, you’re free to interpret these ingredients in whatever way you want.
For example, the 2004 ingredients were ice, island, dawn, assault, which ended up inspiring games like The Mountain Witch (climbing icy Mount Fuji to assault the witch’s fortress), The Dance and the Dawn (try to find your true love at an island social gathering, hoping that — when dawn breaks — you don’t end up with the one that has a heart of ice), and Polaris (arctic elves struggle against themselves and a demonic assault, with the dawn finally coming for the first time in hundreds of years).
Check the full rules for the competition, and get cooking! You have until midnight Alaska time (UTC) on June 21 to submit your game.