uhhhhh / Game-a-week #6 Postmortem

Hi friends! Back on itch for this devlog! 

Not sure if the itch page for last week's game will ever see the light of day (it's on github for now though!) But happy to be back on itch for this devlog.

This week's theme was tough for me: two buttons. As someone who is always interested in playing with control schemes and input, i had a hard time zero-ing in on something particular when the theme was actually /about/ input. I pondered over making some sort of keyboard twister game, but had a hard time not making it GIRP. My final working idea was having your keys represent tiles on a floor that fell, and having to keep your two feet (fingers) on the ground as long as possible.  

I was also super inspired by funny water ring toy: 

possibly the most iconic two button game. While thinking of a possible theming for funny water ring toy game, i thought of the interface on an old flip phone. Each phone usually had two upper buttons to navigate left and right through menus. Maybe I could make the water toy in an old phone to double down on the nostalgia bait? 

After taking a break for a few days, I thought the phone aspect was a bit more interesting than the funny water ring toy aspect, and I didn't want to spend too much time on a game this week. Because of this, I ended up thinking of a tiny writing game: I would make the player delete the old texts on their phone, thinking over the last time they heard from each contact. This is something I've done more than once while being stuck at home, lol. As someone who just graduated college pre-pandemic, I'm finally now facing the fact that there are so many faces I saw every day that I likely won't hear from again. I wanted to focus on the finality of those interactions, so I made the player only be able to read all of their texts by deleting the ones before it. 

I wanted to use the actual texts from my phone for this, but its at my parents house D: maybe if I polish it up after all the game a weeks ill do this! 

One issue I had with this was that I've never had any strong narrative to any of my games before, and I wasn't really sure if I wanted to try to evoke anything (or anything specific) from the player. I decided to put the game's narrator's thoughts in each text, in hopes the player reflects on the people on their old phones too. Not sure how that turned out in its final version, but was an interesting design process!

All in all, I was happy I tried this. Probably the fastest dev time for my game-a-weeks, it was a good experiment. See yall next week! Obligatory reminder to tell your old friends you love them 

<3