Birds Nest
This was created in a weekend for Extra Credits' Extra Game Jam. The theme was Passage.
This weekend, I attended my great grandfather's Celebration of Life event.
This weekend was also the game jam I've been looking forward to.
So, this weekend, I made a game exploring my feelings about my family and my experiences with attending the funerals of my grandfather and great grandfather.
I used a 4 color palette for the art. The tileset assets are courtesy of RPG Maker, the rest of the art is from yours truly.
now please excuse me while i sleep for two weeks, thank you
Comments
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Hey SmokeAndAsh, thanks for the opportunity to experience a piece of your own story through this game. The writing was easily some of the best I've seen in any recent game jam, and I was quickly able to identify with the main characters. The amount of personality you were able to build into each NPC is really impressive.
On top of that, the unique art style and cutscene animations added a lot of flavor. I also like how the largely grayscale color scheme helps reflect the solemn mood and "lack of feeling" mentioned by the main character.
If you have a chance to add on to this game later, one thing that I'd love to see are portraits added to the dialogue box in order to see the face of the person who's talking. This would be especially helpful in cutscenes with 3+ people.
Finally, I also wanted to mention how cool it is that dialogue choices allow you to change the story a bit, which helps each person's playthrough feel more personal. The amount of dialogue you were able to write in such a short jam is impressive on its own, but the fact that you also wrote alternate lines and branching dialogue trees is amazing.
Thanks again for sharing this experience, and please keep us posted if you release a new version at some point. I'll definitely be excited to see more about this project, or whatever you're planning to release next!
Thank you for the game and for sharing your personal experience!
Despite the subject of the story, I can't say that I've felt sad when playing it. Rather, the game made me feel somewhat indifferent at the beginning, but slowly grow me more and more interested in details of the complex family relations and why everything is happening the way it is. I especially liked segments when I was allowed to just talk to different people and explore their reactions. I wish this type of storytelling was more of the focus of the game, but I understand that character dialogs and narration was needed to emotionally ground player in the story.
With that said, I felt a bit of a dissonance between exploration segments and story segments. Talking to everybody on the funeral felt out of the character, as it was established during the dialog sequences.