The jam page never states its theme in text. It sits in an image under the Theme heading, a dripping green and white card that reads Graveyard Shift beside a gas station sign, and the entrants took those two words in both directions at once.
Some went to the cemetery. Kick the Bucket VR seats you in the cab of a rusty mustard-yellow backhoe as the night-time grave digger at a cemetery in the early 1990s, with five graves to finish before the sun comes up at 6:00 AM, a supervisor named Earl on the CB radio and a box of mixtapes somebody left behind, while The Catacombs makes you the watchman on All Hallows Eve, feeding resin into lamps that a ghost keeps blowing out. More of them took the shift. Deliverboo is an e-bike delivery run from 8 PM to 2 AM on Halloween night, Candlelight: The Melting Shift hires you as a security guard at a run-down wax museum, Koko Cane follows an underpaid clown who beats spectres back off a ghost train with a cane, and No Smoking at the Gas Station is a night shift spent putting out fires. The Spook Store staffs a shop across the road from a graveyard. Weekend Rush locks you inside an office when the building seals itself after Friday overtime, and Haunted Cleanup VR, a sweep-and-scrub job in a haunted house, relabels the itch.io launch button on its page to read Run job.
That is nine of the seventeen putting the player on the clock in some form. Kick the Bucket commits hardest, with a start menu headed A Graveyard Shift whose first option is Clock In, a shift-length line reading Full Shift: 12.5 Min, and a vignette toggle, the standard comfort fix for moving a seated player through a world, sitting one line below it.
What the builds say about the toolchain
Five entries name Godot on their pages, in itch.io’s Made with field, in their tags or in their descriptions, and three of them (Deliverboo, Candlelight and Haunted Cleanup) credit Godot XR Tools, the community library of ready-made VR scenes that sits on top of the engine’s OpenXR support so a jam team is not writing locomotion and object pickup from nothing. One names Unity: Princess Sakura’s Eternal Battle, which is also the only entry built for Google Cardboard, and whose page points out that the APK will run on an Android phone as a split screen, just without the stereo, if you have no viewer. The other eleven do not say. For anyone who watched small developers price out the runtime fee Unity announced in September 2023, five to one is not a surprising ratio, even with that many abstentions.
The platform split follows the host’s FAQ, which told entrants to aim for as many headsets as possible and to consider both a PC build and an Android build. itch.io’s filter on the jam counts twelve Android builds and eleven Windows builds, and eight entries ship both. The host’s own entry, Kawaii Zombie Makeover, in which you apply makeup to a zombie because you procrastinated your way out of a better internship, is an untagged APK that only works with hand tracking, and it was submitted thirteen minutes and thirty-one seconds before the host’s own deadline.
Two entries went past what the FAQ asked for. Deliverboo, its developer’s first finished game, uploads an Arm64 build next to its x86_64 Linux, Windows and Android builds, and tags its page steam-frame. Beak & Bone, a two-player co-op puzzle game about plague doctors who can cooperate only through their masks, heavily inspired by the We Were Here series by its developer’s own account, ships Linux ARM and Windows ARM builds alongside the usual pair. Valve’s Steam Frame runs an ARM build of SteamOS and leans on FEX to translate x86 code when a game has no ARM version, so an Arm64 export is the one that skips that layer. Neither page says the build was tested on a Frame. Haunted Cleanup is the one entry that needs no install at all: next to a Quest APK and a Windows build its developer labels untested, it ships a WebXR build that runs in the browser.
itch.io’s AI disclosure field makes one more thing countable. Ten of the seventeen pages mark themselves AI assisted, all ten for code, four of them for graphics and three for sound as well. Four state that no generative AI was used, and three leave the field empty.
