We’re at the halfway point of January, and that means we’re at the halfway point of the latest edition of our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1929! As in past years, we’re celebrating the entry of new works into the public domain by calling on game designers of all stripes and levels of experience to create digital and analog games based on these now-copyright-free works from 1929.
We’ve already gotten a few interesting early entries, and we expect a lot more to come in as the deadline approaches — but for now that deadline is still more than two weeks away, and that’s still plenty of time to get started and build a game of your own.
As usual, we’ll be awarding prizes to winners in six categories. Every entry has a shot at either the Best Analog Game or Best Digital Game award, but if you don’t feel like competing for those coveted titles, you can also tighten your focus: put your art and design skills to work for the Best Visuals prize, do justice to a work you love for the Best Adaptation prize, mix and match an interesting selection of sources for the Best Remix prize, or dive deep into obscure and unexpected sources for the Best Deep Cut prize. Some of the most intriguing and surprising games from past jams were squarely aimed at these special categories!
If you want to get involved, head on over to the game jam page on Itch to read the full rules and sign up — then start designing! And for those who are already hard at work, we’re excited to see what you’re cooking up. The jam runs through the end of January, and then we’ll be testing out all the entries to select our winners. Thanks to everyone who’s getting involved and showing why a robust and growing public domain matters.
If you’ve been following the Kickstarter campaign for our new card game, One Billion Users, then you know we’re not quite on track on to hit our goal — but we haven’t given up! We’ve now passed the halfway mark in funds raised, and we’re doing everything we can to make a final push before the campaign this week. So if you’ve been hesitating, now is the time! Please head on over to Kickstarter and become a backer to secure your copy of this fast, fun, competitive cared game about building the biggest and best social network.
For those who have already backed the campaign, don’t give up hope! Tell your friends, spread it around, and keep your fingers crossed — we really want to get this game out into the world, and we’ll be working hard to drum up support here on the home stretch. Also, in case you missed it, we’ve also added a new tier for superbackers who want to give us some extra support.
We do have other plans if the campaign fails to hit its goal this time around (we won’t be giving up!) but for now we’re focused on these remaining five days. Thanks again to everyone who has already contributed, and with a little luck you’ll soon be able to play One Billion Users.
As part of our final push to get our Kickstarter campaign for our new card game over the line, we’ve added a new limited tier for backers who want to show their support while getting more involved. We’re inviting 5 superbackers to work with us to co-design new cards that will be included in the game. This is your chance to make a permanent mark on One Billion Users!
When you back us at the new Design a Card tier, we’ll work with you directly to brainstorm a new card, figure out its gameplay rules, and craft a fresh visual design. You’ll be able to choose one of three types of cards:
An Influencer card, with a brand new personality, to go alongside our existing slate of Influencers like The Investor and The Contrarian. They’ll have their own unique name, custom emoji-based portrait, and rules for choosing which network they join in the game.
A Network card, used for advanced play to give each player unique powers and constraints, to go alongside our existing Networks like TapTap, EnvyGram and Friendlink. It could be based on another real-life social network, or perhaps a fresh invention of the kind of network you’d like to see. It will have a name and custom-designed logo art, and a set of brand new rules.
An Event card, which comes up randomly during the game. It could be an ongoing event (like the existing Tech Bubble or Regulation events) or a one-time event (like the Social Shuffle or Troll Trouble events). Event cards don’t have unique artwork, but they are a great opportunity if you’re interested in game design, with lots of leeway for crafting interesting rules that will become very important to the game.
Whatever you choose, it will be a collaborative design process where you’re involved at every step (or, if you prefer, you can just give us your idea and we’ll run with it!) You’ll also get an acknowledgement in the rulebook, and we’ll throw in ten copies of the finished boxed game, so you can show off your contribution to your friends. Head on over to Kickstarter to learn more.
We’re past the halfway point of our Kickstarter campaign for One Billion Users, a new competitive card game about building the biggest and best social media network. We’re very excited to get this game into people’s hands, but we won’t be able to do it without your support! If you want to try your hand at building a social media network, please back the campaign and secure your copy before it’s too late.
The game is nearly ready to produce, with a beautiful deck of over 120 cards, and we’ve got our manufacturing plans all sorted out — all we need now is some help to get the Kickstarter over the line. So please, back the campaign and tell your friends, and get ready to build a social media network with One Billion Users.
Yes, it’s that time of year again! We’re gearing up for the latest edition of our annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1929! We’ve been running these game jams ever since 2019, when new works began entering the public domain in the US for the first time in over two decades, as a way to highlight the creativity that comes from a robust and growing public domain. Starting on January 1st, 2025, we’ll be doing it again to celebrate works from 1929 that are finally losing their copyright protection after nearly a century.
As in past years, we’re calling on designers of all stripes to create both analog and digital games that build on works entering the public domain. There are plenty of interesting works to draw on, including:
Written works by Agatha Christie, William Faulkner, Mahatma Gandhi, Dashiell Hammett, Ellery Queen, Virginia Woolf
Art by Salvador Dalí, Edward Hopper, Frieda Kahlo, Tamara de Lempicka, René Magritte
Films including Blackmail, The Cocoanuts, The Skeleton Dance, St. Louis Blues
Music by Irving Berlin, Noël Coward, Duke Ellington, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Bessie Smith, Thomas “Fats” Waller
Other characters including Buck Rogers, Popeye, and Tintin
And that list only scratches the surface – there are lots more 1929 works, from the famous to the obscure, and we even have a prize for the best game with an obscure and unexpected source of inspiration.
If you’re interested in games, the public domain, or both, we encourage you to get involved – whether or not you have any experience as a game designer. There are lots of great tools available that let anyone build a simple digital game, like interactive fiction engine Twine and the storytelling platform Story Synth from Randy Lubin, our game design partner and co-host of this jam (check out his guide to building a Story Synth game in an hour here on Techdirt). And an analog game can be as simple as a single page of rules. For inspiration, you can have a look at last year’s winners and our series of winner spotlight posts that take a look at each year’s winning entries in more detail.
The game jam will run through the month of January, 2025 and at the end we’ll be choosing winners in six categories, and awarding a choice of prizes from Techdirt and Diegetic Games. You can read the full rules and other details, and sign up to participate, on the game jam page over on Itch.io. Every year we’ve been blown away by the creativity on display from designers who enter the jam, and we know this year will be no different! See you in January, when Gaming Like It’s 1929 begins.
If you look around, virtual reality growth projections are all over the map. Most of the folks with money invested in the market see nothing but blue sky ahead. But several core problems remain: virtual reality headsets still make a lot of people sick (anywhere from 40-70% of users), and a huge swath of people simply don’t like having a giant chunk of sweaty plastic strapped to their face.
The other problem has largely been the lack of any true, unmissable “killer app.” I’m not a VR doomer; I currently own three headsets (PS5 VR2, The Oculus Quest 3S, and the Vive Index). I’ve been tinkering with the technology since I first strapped on a headset demo at E3 in 2000.
Using all three makes me sick after more than 20 minutes, no matter what kind of tricks I try. And while I’ve enjoyed some scattered game experiences on all three, the market still seems fairly awash in lower quality derivative stuff that doesn’t have a whole lot of staying power once the novelty wears off. They’re also all just generally uncomfortable to various degrees, making them ill-suited for extended use.
Developers seem to agree with the state of the sector; a recent survey of game developers found that 56 percent of them find the VR market is “currently declining or stagnating.” In part because the cost to develop these products isn’t being recouped on the other end due to limited mass market appeal for all the reasons outlined above.
The landmark moment for the industry recently was the release of the costly Apple Vision Pro, and while Apple users get defensive about the point and will immediately proclaim “it’s just a prototype!”, it landed with a giant thud. Developers tend to agree, stating Apple’s impact on the market was minimal thus far.
While the Meta headsets are decent products, the same problem remains: VR simply doesn’t have mass market appeal. You can’t under-estimate how little most of the public likes having cumbersome, dorky plastic strapped to their face.
A lot of the problem translates into the fact that the technology (battery life and size, computing scale and power) simply isn’t where it needs to be for AR/VR to live up to the hype and break through to the mainstream. For mass adoption the technology needs to be seamless, minimalistic, and utterly unobtrusive, not whatever this is supposed to be:
From there you need to develop a groundbreaking software ecosystem and a compilation of near-magical, non-vomit inducing killer apps that justify the price tag. Preferably with minimal walled gardens and annoying limits. Eventually somebody will create the near-perfect device and ecosystem, but I have a sneaking suspicion that, despite all of his money and effort and mid-life crisis fashion rebranding efforts, it probably won’t be Mark Zuckerberg.
Like LLMs (“AI”) there’s just a ton of potential in virtual and augmented reality that goes well beyond pretending to be Batman. Unfortunately, VC hucksters once again let the apple cart get ahead of the horse, flooding the market and press with mindless hype and unrealistic expectations. It will probably take another 5-10 years for reality and technology to finally catch up.
A small tabletop roleplaying game is an excellent project to undertake for a jam like this, as putting one together requires nothing more than a clear theme and some written rules, but that doesn’t mean making a good one is easy. To stand out, such a game needs to shine in at least one way whether that’s highly engaging written content for the setting and characters, or rich and interesting rules that suggest gameplay depth, or — as is often the most impressive, and as is the case with Lucienne Impala’s Letters to Cthulhu — a creative and clever core mechanic that brings the entire thing into focus.
The game, which is based on the H. P. Lovecraft story of the same name and the broader mythos of his works, puts players in the shoes (or robes) of Cthulhu cultists trying to communicate with their dark god. There’s a thematic core that’s essential to this kind of Lovecraftian story and setting: a roiling mixture of ambition, avarice, fear, power, awe, and madness. Lovecraft explored these themes through dozens of stories, while the game takes them on in a mere ten pages of rules.
The game is simple: one player takes on the role of Cthulhu, and will serve as the judge of the outcome, while the rest are tasked with composing the letter that will be judged. The group’s goal is to bring Cthulhu forth into the world, but each cultist is also randomly assigned a secret desire of their own, and each contributes just one sentence to the letter as it’s passed around the group. And there’s a twist: each cultist also has a specific way in which they can alter the previous sentence.
How they use this power (and if they use it at all) is up to them — will they try to manipulate the letter to ensure their own desires are fulfilled, or try to stymie the greed of others and keep the group on track towards its shared goal? Perhaps both, or neither. It becomes a monstrously corrupted game of telephone, where every link in the chain matters. The balance of desires in the final letter will determine the outcome, as the player representing Cthulhu uses a few simple rules (and a lot of freeform narrative creativity) to decide the fate that befalls the group and each individual.
The game is designed to move relatively quickly so it can be played more than once, each time with different players taking on the role of Cthulhu and different desires for all the cultists, and it’s best played with a larger group of 6-8 people. The tense, paranoid, conniving dynamic the game creates is subtle and specific to its source material, and is successfully established by just a few pages of rules that anyone can learn in moments. That kind of design elegance is always worth of note, and earns Letters to Cthulhu the title of Best Analog Game.
And that’s a wrap on this year’s winner spotlights. A huge thanks to everyone who submitted a game this year! We’ll be back next January, as always, with Gaming Like It’s 1929 —and whether you’ve entered the jam before or are thinking about doing it for the first time, it’s never too early to start exploring the many great works that will be entering the public domain in 2025.
Most of the submissions we receive in these jams come from solo designers, but this game is a powerful demonstration of what a small team can accomplish. By splitting up the tasks (Javi Muhrer did the programming, Chris Muhrer designed the levels, and McCoy Khamphouy created the art) were able to achieve something fairly rare in the jam: a complete video game, built from the ground up with all original elements. Based on the early American picture book of the same name by Wanda Gag, Millions of Cats is a classic puzzle platformer that offers everything you’d expect from such a title: a clever core mechanic that’s easy to understand and seems simple at first, but which must be used in increasingly creative and thoughtful ways through a series of increasingly challenging levels.
As the player, you control the character described in the original book only as “the very old man”, who is plagued and/or blessed by avid followers in the form of unlimited cats. With a button press, you can spawn more and more cats to trail behind you and copying your actions, and though you can’t control them directly, with some clever movement you can maneuver them to press buttons and help you reach the end of each level. Your score can be increased by using as few cats as possible, adding a great “find the true solution” challenge that gives puzzle games like this more replay value.
After a couple of levels, it quickly becomes clear how this mechanic can easily serve as the engine for all kinds of puzzles. That alone would be a satisfying prototype and more than enough for a game jam entry — the kind of thing a solo developer could pull off too. But this small team didn’t stop there. By having a dedicated level designer, they were able to include a pretty full slate of levels (I’m not quite sure of the final count, as I didn’t get to the end!) that explore several aspects of the core mechanic. Level design is so critical to puzzle platformers like this, so it really pays off. And while all this could have been presented with placeholder graphics or something generic, instead we get handcrafted original sprites and backgrounds, and even a custom title treatment for the game.
Overall, this is probably the most ambitious video game project we’ve had as an entry in these game jams, and it absolutely lives up to that ambition. That’s a testament not just to the skill and talent of the individual designers, but also to their ability to organize and coordinate a development project like this while each focuses on their area of expertise. It’s no surprise that Millions of Cats is this year’s Best Digital Game.
As you probably know, David has been a repeat winner in this jam ever since his first entry, and Solar Storm 1928 continues his track record of submitting games that blow our mind with their creativity and uniqueness. It’s a tabletop game that forges a connection between two very different works from 1928: Buckminster Fuller’s design for the Dymaxion House (a futuristic home design that sought to “maximum gain of advantage from minimal energy input”) and a huge collection of sketches from astronomers at the Mt. Wilson Observatory, documenting solar storm activity. Some of Fuller’s sketches just scream out to be used as game board, so that’s where things begin: with each player designing their own Dymaxion House by placing the walls and furniture on the floorplan, already outfitted with some futuristic fixtures.
Next, the true game begins, as the players subject each others’ houses to acute damage caused by solar activity across a series of rounds, while struggling to keep their own houses together by making repairs, rearranging doors and furniture, installing reflectors, and utilizing special tools like the bathroom fogger and vacuum pump. This is already enough for an extremely cool game about Fuller’s design — you could have players rolling dice or using some other simple source of randomness to determine the amount of damage. But this is where Solar Storm 1928 goes a step further, and reaches for a true deep-cut public domain source. The amount of damage that players must contend with is instead generated by having each turn represent a day of the year (players can begin the game on any date they choose), then pulling the actual documented solar storm activity for that day from the collection of Mt. Wilson Observatory sketches. A simple analytic process laid out in the rules translates each sketch into a number of damaged tiles for the round.
As play proceeds, the player grids fill up with damage and alterations, until one house fails entirely at which point all the houses get scores based on how they held up.
As with all the designer’s past winning games, Solar Storm 1928 isn’t just mechanically interesting, it’s also a thoughtful and playful reflection on the works it draws from. This time, the game also includes a full separate booklet of Designer Notes, discussing and explaining the origin and nature of this reflection: inspired by visits to old observatories and a fascination with their handwritten records, leading to the discovery of the sunspot sketches which in turn sparked thoughts of architecture and engineering. The game then emerged as a way to explore “the tension between the idea of the universe being difficult, and humans trying to make up for it.” For succeeding wonderfully in this reflection while offering fun and engaging gameplay, all grown from the seed of some technical drawings in an observatory’s archives, Solar Storm 1928 is this year’s Best Deep Cut.
Although Steamboat Willie gets all the attention, there were actually several early cartoons that entered the public domain this year, and what better way to compete for the Best Remix award than by using a whole bunch of them in a game? That’s exactly what The Burden of Creation does, using images clipped from several 1928 animated shorts including and especially the early appearances of KoKo the Clown from Fleischer Studios, alongside multiple Disney releases, and putting them all together in a mysterious and moody walking simulator.
It’s tough to capture good screenshots of the game, as its pixelated low-res aesthetic only really work in motion, and the exact quality of graphics seems to vary for different players — but some animated GIFs provided by the designer convey the feel:
The game starts with the player outdoors, moving towards a strange building, and soon you’ll find yourself wandering its gloomy gray hallways and encountering various characters and tableaus clipped from cartoons. Some scenes have intriguing dialogue, some doors are locked, some hallways have strange signs on the walls, and soon it becomes clear there’s a mystery hiding in this place.
The player can unravel that mystery by engaging in some light puzzle-esque gameplay, which will result in some surprising revelations and striking changes in scenery — but I don’t want to give too much away, as it’s best experienced firsthand at the game’s slow and thoughtful pace, underscored by period-appropriate music that seals the dreary atmosphere. For those who don’t want to play but would like to see it unfold, two different commenters on Itch linked to videos of their own full playthroughs.
As we continue to see works from the era of early American animation enter the public domain each year, there will always be some entries that capture the lion’s share of attention, none moreso than Steamboat Willie. So it’s great to see a designer casting a wider net like this, shining a spotlight on some other great cartoons, and putting them all together in such an intriguing way. For that, The Burden Of Creation is this year’s Best Remix.
