Hi everyone,

To accompany this update, I’ve decided to include a relatively short postmortem about this game, of which I and the rest of the team are very proud. It was a great jam with a group of great people who all made this possible.

Postmortem

We are proud of what we achieved with this game. Initially developed in 48 hours (and the quality of the code shows it !) and polished a little in the following weeks, the game was the second highest rated by the public, first in the “Gameplay” category and received the “Best Story Driven Game” award at the LvlUp game jam 2021 awards ceremony. I wanted to provide you with a short overview of what we did right and wrong.

We are especially proud of the way in which story, ambiance, level and game design and gameplay work together to provide a unique and intense, if brief, experience, trying to bring a perspective - in a dramatic way - on the topic of war refugees.

The absence of a menu was intentional. We intended from the start for this game to be immersive as much as we could. We wanted the immerse the player in a slice of life. To that effect we provided a safe environment in which they could explore the level and learn the mechanics and controls, all while immersing themselves in the setting, the architecture, the ambiance of this ordinary peaceful village.

In the second part of the game, we intended to create a rupture that would shock the player. To that effect, we included a stealth level, with the objective of escaping the horrors unfolding. “From Dreams to Nightmares” was the theme of the jam, which we interpreted as “From Innocence to Horror”. The hide-and-seek mechanics and the knowledge of the level learnt in the first level was here to be used in order to escape the immediate threat that suddenly interrupts the peaceful lives of innocents.

We had included an ability to throw rocks in order to distract the soldiers. If you weren’t even aware this feature existed, that’s on us. Unfortunately, this was part of what we call “feature creep”. It could not realistically be introduced properly in the short span of the game. I therefore decided to remove this feature in this update.

As a bit of an anecdote, we also had the idea of adding flower pots that you could knock over to try to knock out enemies. This idea suffers from the same flaws as the previous feature, and ultimately was not used in the final game.

The technical state in which we left the game left a lot to desire, so I went back and fixed a few of the big (and also not so big) issues that were bothering us. Most notably the file size, which has been greatly reduced by compressing one big audio sample.

We also added more control indications, so that players wouldn’t be stuck, not knowing which buttons to press to move or pass a dialog.

The web version of the game is also now much much much better to play, thanks to multiple changes !

A more precise list of changes can be found below.

Thanks for playing,

Florian

Changelog

In no particular order:

• Massively reduced the file size of the game.
• Added more control indications.
• Removed rock throwing ability.
• The player now appears behind covers when hiding.
• The background doesn’t loop vertically anymore.
• Improved credits scene and added an exit button.
• Fixed radios desynchronization when turned off and on.
• Fixed some textures.
• Added wind sway to foliage.