Hey! Here is my experience of this jam if interested~
We developed the concept of the game together, and I was the artist and character animator (mostly). As an illustrator, I support the hand-crafted approach, partly because I think there is so much unused potential, and partly because I really enjoy creating it! My ambition is to add some of that grace to the gaming medium as much as I can. I drew everything by hand using fountain pens, Chinagraphs, and occasionally pencil, for textures and details. I also worked on creating the fonts and things related to the UI. Everything was then scanned, tweaked and tested in the game itself.
Personally, I really enjoyed this jam! This is our second jam (in general and together), and we are grateful to all the people who played and left encouraging and helpful feedback! We felt that there were a lot of ideas and mechanics to expand the gameplay in relation to the theme that we didn't have time to incorporate in the week, especially since we wanted the game to work more smoothly first. We plan to expand it even further after the voting period, so feedback and suggestions that you would like to see are welcome! And feel free to follow if interested in the journey ahead :) https://cohzach.itch.io/mental-trap
P.S. I do daily scribbles on my IG story and of course the week of the jam was no exception, so here is one of them, LOL
Wow you learned so much! That's great!! Blending important details in the environment is such a fun game mechanic too. I left your game a rating :)
For us, we came up with our game idea by giving up on the idea and spamming gibberish in a google doc with some ones sprinkled in between LOL. And then we realized wait this is kinda fun if we race... After that we did some prototyping and I went to think of the lore/tutorial. I feel like my experience involved thinking how to avoid ludonarrative dissonance. Once we thought of an established world, elements in the game could be built up and exist as cohesive and natural elements in the world.
That being said, so much of the lore was left unincorporated in the game because it's hard to reconcile a racing game with time for lore. So here are massive spoilers for the game world we thought of because I have nowhere else to say it :D but here's the game if you want to play it first: /jam/brackeys-16/rate/4937629
The world of SPEED D1FF is inspired by the short book "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas". It's a story of a utopic city called Omelas (pronounced OH-meh-lahss) whose continued prosperity depends on the misery of a single child. While seemingly contrived, it draws parallels to systemic inequality and disproportionate incentive structures in society. Pushing this inequality metaphor to an extreme, Omelas poses a valid dilemma to the reader asking them the question:
This will be an exercise for the reader :D
Clicking on the 1 in NAV1GATE
You’ve been trained to look out for ONEs for what seems to be a job (you may or may not have consented to) at Gigamonopoly Incorporated. It’s a demanding, fast-paced job, forcing you to become more proficient. Even outside your work shifts, you begin to notice more and more ONEs: from the corners of the screen to the bezel of the monitor. How strange. Each one you find transmits some unattributed and cryptic message to you. And as you find more of them, the 1 in SPEED D1FF itself begins to light up. From top left to bottom right, these are the messages:
Breakdown: The first 4 of these are from Gigamonopoly themselves. Recruitment, marketing, directives. Some messages are more corroded than others. 5 and 8 are a cry for help from something that identifies as the ONEs who walked away and those that proclaim they are literal ONEs. 7 is a couplet that reads like this: “Honesty is left alone when everyone has money. Abandoned then are all our bones in Onelas’ honey.” It describes the opulence of Onelas (the honey), the complacency perpetuated by the system (honesty left alone), and what we’re willing to give to preserve our way of life (the bones).
a couplet I wrote at 4 am
“Here at Gigamonopoly Incorporated, our handy-dandy artificial superintelligence, the Singularity, built us a utopia that solves the Omelas problem. We call it… Onelas (pronounced OH-neh-lahss). The Singularity calculated the ones who walk away are a liability and their continued suboptimal existence would be, well, suboptimal. Why not recycle them into our system? Why not have the ones who walk away also... be the child in misery? And why just one child? And what better way to fuel misery than one’s own proclivity to walk away? We just need to make sure when they walk away they get recycled all over again…”
—Gigamonopoly Shareholder, presumably
It seems like you, whatever you are, were required to assist in the recycling of the ONEs who walked away. To find them. To purge them. To utilize your optic wiring for optimal emancipation. But why are the ONEs who walked away actual ONEs?
As the main character runs out of the room, notice the shape of the door they run out of. Notice where we transition from. And notice how the CRT number in the bottom left has changed. This is either a different computer, a recycled memory, or a different person entirely. As part of the Singularity’s system, your previous self is hinted to have entered a ONE of sorts, to hide? Or to be recycled? It also begs the question, how much of Onelas has walked away?
Pressing the 1 in SPEED D1FF after finding all the title screen ONEs
A fun fact: we thought of the name Onelas but then changed it back to Omelas because we thought no one would understand the reference. But then Nyum Software chimed in about how Omelas is actually not in the public domain so we can't use it anyways, and so we went back to Onelas which I mean fits the whole ONE theme but everyone pronounces incorrectly as one-las T_T. Alas.
Clearly there was not enough detail added to the game to really convey this whole narrative. Nor did we test if it was even a compelling narrative 🤷♂️
I had a friend debate that since people in the Omelas story are truthful about the child kept in misery, they still preserve their integrity. And that one child suffering is more than worth it to keep the rest of the world prosperous. I have no comment on this :D
