What makes a good theme?
As I'm slaughtering I thought I would write a couple of my personal opinions for what makes a good theme.
When I think about the themes I think about:
- If the theme makes me excited to participate.
- How varied everyones games would be.
- If I would be excited to rate everyone elses games.
- How much freedom vs restriction it gives the developer.
- How many possible interpretations there are.
As an example, while slaughtering I saw the theme "Pirates". I honestly really like this theme even though it feels pretty generic, there are so many different aspects of being a Pirate, like cannons, the crew on board, mutinies, the boats, the swordfights as well as gunfights, treasures, exploring oceans/islands, it could also be modern pirates, or cyberpirates. It is however very visually limiting, I think a lot of the games would look similar, which is not as fun. But overall I would be very excited to see what games people make with this theme and I would be excited to rate them.
A type of theme that I'm personally not a huge fan of are the ones that feel like rules. Like "Every 10 seconds", it felt more like a rule that I had to follow than a theme to inspire me. Even though the games that came out of that were really cool, to me it felt frustrating to think of something with that theme.
Theme measuring metric?
I think the ratio of sign ups to submissions could also be a metric of what makes a good theme. If people aren't inspired enough to finish their game or even come up with one then I think that is a sign of a bad theme:
If we use this as the main "good theme" metric, then "A Small World" is our golden standard for themes (so far).
My favorite
Personally my all time favorite theme was Game Off 2022, which was "Cliché". It felt like a million possibilities but it's still a theme across all games, there are so many fun interpretations and you basically get to set your own limitations. I didn't get the theme at first but the jam hosts explanation made me really excited to make a game:
Anyways I might just be overthinking this.