The Bring Out Your Ghosts jam is a place to show off the ghosts of the game development process. Abandoned or forgotten WIPs. Overly ambitious projects that never got off the ground. Notes and ideas for games that never came to be.
The name and timing of the jam is inspired by the Ghost Festival (or Zhongyuanjie) in East Asian tradition, a time when the ghosts of the deceased are said to visit the living. Imagine being visited by the ghosts of dead WIPs. What would they say?
Incomplete and abandoned games, ideas, notes, etc. are all welcome.
Projects updated because of this jam are also okay. If you decide to revisit (or finish!) an old abandoned project because of this jam, that’s great!
As with the original Bring Out Your Dead Jam, it would be nice if you include some context in the Author’s Notes when submitting. How did your project come about? Why was it abandoned or forgotten? What lessons can be learned from the process? This is optional but encouraged
While the creators of this jam come from the interactive fiction community, any games, physical games, text, etc. are allowed.
It’s just barebones notes and placeholder code, but the idea was a choicescript game set in a magical high school where your friendships give you powers based on the person you’re siphoning from (you’re basically a succubus-type person who thrives on and steals the emotions of others). The worst friends give you the best powers, so you have to balance being strong with enjoying your social life.
Sadly, I won’t be finishing my longform projects for this - but I’ll be reintroducing one that’s been on hiatus for a while now… (and also finishing my Single-Choice entry lol)
I have a small-ish game I always meant to push through, but it never seemed to fit any one jam. This reminded me of it, but this month, I will probably have way too much to do.
So, anything submissions that are reviewable, I want to review it, so this jam is a full success and it’s open again next year!
(Also, it motivated me to put out final releases of some projects where I had a bunch of bug fixes but got in why-bother mode. Maintenance work and testing are far less taxing than actually making something new and creative.)
This jam came perfectly for me! I was going to finish up an old project I left unfinished but NarraScope and then IntroComp pulled up and took my bandwidth.
Thank god this jam accepts physical games. I plan to finish up a hack of a solo RPG I really like. I could just replace the narrative aspects and call it a day, but the timeline for this jam is encouraging me to consider ways I can build off the existing system. (Something, something, thrill of time constraints.)
I uploaded an old draft I never finished called Misty Mystery. Can anyone refresh my memory about how to get the game to open in a new window? My other games do that by default.
Are you thinking of “launch in fullscreen”? About halfway down the project page, the first thing under Embed options. You probably want to check “Enable scrollbars” as well…
Ha! in the middle of editing it 
