When you’re cooped up inside all day long (for forty-five days and counting), making a game can make for a good distraction. There have been more than a few quarantine-related game jams, each with their own themes and concepts. Isolation, social-solidarity, and “stay home” are common, and when the historians look back at the prolific game dev output of 2020 it won’t be too hard to sniff out the symbolism. Here, I’ve taken a quick look at games from two month(ish)-long Coronavirus 2020 jams. Some are from the Portland Indie Games Scene jam (do I mostly just love that the acronym is PIGS? Who is to say. Not me.) and the others are from the House and Home Jam.
We’ve got some games about forts, some games about thinking too much, and a call to break out your craft supplies. Jam on.