Theme

Keeping it simple for the first game jam, the theme is the USSR. Home of the first successful communist revolution and workers' state, the Soviet Union seems a good place to begin. How you engage with this theme is up to you. Games based on Soviet literature and cinema, games featuring events and figures from Soviet history, games that might have been made in the Soviet Union if computer gaming had taken off there, the possibilities are many.

If you want to make a retro-style game, you may find these resources useful:

Submission Requirements

Submissions must be posted publicly in the submissions subthread below.
Submissions must be turned in on time (by 5PM Eastern time on March 18)
Submissions must follow the Jam's theme
Submissions must not promote reactionary ideas (bigotry, imperialism, etc.)
No pornographic works (sexual themes may be fine, but explicit sexual content is not)
For safety purposes, submissions must include source code

Awards

Submissions will be eligible for the following awards, based on community vote:

Best Overall: The best overall game for both theme and engagement.
Most Thematic: The game that best exemplifies the jam's theme.
Most Engaging: The game that offers the best gameplay experience, whether that be through mechanics, artwork, story, etc.

Voting will be done in a dedicated voting thread, to be created near the end of the submission deadline. To minimize the risk of sockpuppeting/ballot stuffing, each user will post their votes under their username and an account must have had at least 10 posts as of March 1 to vote. My initial plan was to have votes delivered to my privately to avoid any game emerging as a frontrunner early, but ultimately I decided that it wouldn't be worth the loss in transparency.

Commenting Policy

To keep things easy to follow, I've created separate subthreads for entry submissions and donation announcements. Please put submissions/donations in these subthreads or I might miss them.

Donation Drive

The community has decided to use this game jam to promote the good work of Doctors Without Borders in Ukraine and elsewhere.

You can donate to DWB here. To have your donation counted toward the total, post a screenshot of your donation into the subthread below (with personal information scrubbed, of course!).

To kick things off, here is my own contribution.

So far, Hexjam has raised $360.92 for Doctors Without Borders.