The Nordic Game Jam 2021 is over and–as far as I know–everyone survived. My team set out to make a “cinematic text adventure” you can play in your browser. Which wasn’t totally a thing, so we had to invent some stuff.
The theme, announced at 6:30PM Friday, was “Pending.” (Yes, you can imagine the initial confusion!) We had the story, setting and characters in rough form by mid-morning Saturday. All five characters were designed, the outline was running in Twine, my basic multiplane hack was running, and I had some of the layouts sketched out by the end of that day. (Around 1AM, for all of us.) Sunday was a sprint to get the temporary artwork replaced, layers assembled and compressed, story finished, and the bugs squashed. We got it submitted at 4:50PM Sunday–10 minutes to spare!
The story and interactive logic were written by Sejr Thompson. The character design and other hand-illustrated art were by Alexander Pechlivanidis. My own role was twofold: Designing the layouts–in an animation sense–of the independently scrolling background and foreground art layers, and hacking the Twine text engine to display them.
It’s a jam game, so there are a few rough edges, but not half as many as you’d expect. Reviews so far have been very good. Check it out: