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WELCOME TO BRIEFS!
Briefs is a micro game publishing series curated by Georg Hobmeier and Evgeni Puzankov. Since 2022, gold extra has been offering scholarships for the development of games the size of a mustard seed every year on a new topic: It's about the quick, good idea, the game brainstorm, or small game essay that opens the world of triple AAA games and mobile games tailored to the target group urgently needed.
The topics so far are and have been: The Absurd (2022), Pigs! (2023) and DEATH (2024)
BASIC SPECS
We want to see games done fast, rather than games that can be played fast. It’s up to you whether to make an infinitely replayable game with questionable presentation, or a two-second game with almost AAA production. We recommend spending no more than 40 hours on development in total. What you make with it is up to you.
We are looking for a digital game playable on a Windows PC. Other platforms and OS are up to you. We’re not accepting analog or tabletop games. Our curator Georg loves web builds, cutaror Zhenia prefers executables, so take your pick. Upon delivery, the game should be free of unintentional game-breaking bugs. It
must also be completed by August 28th, 2025.
ART BRIEF
The theme for the 2025 Briefs series is CHEESE. We’re very excited. Cheese. Milk gone bad the right way. Domestic microorganisms give it to us in exchange for sweet sweet milk. Stinky, soft, hard, petrified, the more extreme the more adored it becomes. Donkey, rhino, pigeon, seal, human, caterpillar the rarest the bestest. What a wonderful substance our ancestors invented!
Cheese’em’alls collecting all kinds of cheese; French weaponized cheese classified as chemical weapons; Cheese-based traps designed to confuse discerning pests, Cheese of Ages, cheese mongering sim, American cheese exceptionalism, etcheesera.
If you want to do all that, please, stop reading and go for it. Cheese. The strategy. The gaming sin we will tempt you with. According to tvtropes:
- It must be considered the “wrong” way to play the game.
- It must succeed relatively often.
- It’s reviled by a large section of the fanbase.
Playing it against the perceived intended design, actively breaking immersion, or playing unfairly. Corner camping in Total War, breaking the boss’s AI, or summoning ashes of war in Elden Ring. The word of the day here is of course perception.
Half of Briefs would say that accessibility features such as in Celeste could be considered cheese. Reviled, wrong, helps succeed. Is making the game the wrong way such as short and free like BRIEFS also cheese? Why speedrunning isn’t considered cheese? Is modding enabling cheese? Are cheats simply cheese
too? etcheesera.
Cheese. Weird, awkward, unpleasant. A shoddy production, inauthentic, flat-out fake. Etcheesera. Is this brief cheesy for citing only tvtropes? We all can feel and get it if a movie is cheesy and if a smile is fake, but what does it mean for a game to be cheesy? What does cheese mean in the era of TikTok? Has authenticity become cheesy as its necessity faded away? Are we asking you to make a short EDF?
APPLY!!!
We might have some cheese with your name on it.
Applications are open until 24th of May!
https://forms.gle/No9WWPm7Fhh4aAaS7
FAQs
There are always questions left we've collected and answered them for you: BRIEFS FAQs
WHAT HAPPENED SO FAR...
The 2022theme was ABSURD and yes, a rhino with yellow swimming briefs wearing an inside out shopping bag is considered absurd. Enjoy a literal Sisyphean typing game or enter the seventh dimension when encountering a long sinister cube thing. But dont despair (yet),it's not alldepressing and addressing the futility of life. The absurd part is also about making games wrong, ignoring the mainstream notions of how we should develop them.
In 2023 BRIEFS evolved aroundPIGS. What do you think about when you hear PIGS? Im sure youre going to start with cops (if you are American)or communists (if you are Russian). Maybe Ms. Piggy! What game can be viewed through the lens of PIGS, with protagonist PIGS, with villainous PIGS, with important PIGS? What game can be about PIGS?
2024 the theme is DEATH.Video games and DEATH have always been tightly bound, violence is a dominant way of interaction after all. Many developers dont include DEATH as a design choice, its just one of our traditions. This year we want you to consider DEATH as a design choice narratively, mechanically, artistically, and politically.
