Theme provided? Mask. We spent 3 hours deliberating how best to fit this theme, and we finally combined two ideas we were all drawn to, masquerade balls and plague doctor masks, neatly into one narrative when we found our biggest inspiration - Edgar Allan Poe's The Masque of the Red Death , an 1842 short story about about a mysterious figure representing a deadly plague infiltrating a masquerade ball and kill everyone across 7 rooms (symbolic of the stages of life).
Mask of the Red Death
Pittsburgh Global Game Jam best theming winner 2026!
The Red Death has come to the party. Find it among the masquerade guests before it’s too late. Inspired by an Edgar Allan Poe short story, for the 2026 theme "mask".
ROLE
Environment Artist, Graphic Designer
TIMELINE
48 hours
Inspiration
Initial ideation.
The final idea.
Environment Art
I took on the role of environment artist, learning Blender overnight and modelling the layout of the rooms, and texturing all seven based on the original source material.
Reference from the source material.
Room environments.
Graphic Design
Additionally, created the team's logo (go Poe's Crows!) and our game's cover art.
Play it, we promise you'll have fun!
You can find our build on the Global Game Jam website.
Just download the release.zip Game Executable, extract the files, and run the Red Death application.
Team
Josh Kaplan, Melanie Danver, Liam Neely, Riya Kanani, Alex Hall, Malaya Heflin, Grace Rodriguez
