Anything For You by Emily Pitcher
You visit your hometown after a year in college. Faced with the aftermath of your grandfather's death, you are tasked with cleaning out your attic, filled with his belongings. Explore the artifacts in the room, learn why your relationship with your grandfather is so strained, and experience poignant flashbacks of when he was alive.
The next day you enter the attic, and all of the progress you made cleaning is reverted. Who is undoing your work? And why does your grandpa's record player keep looping the same song?
Investigate this seemingly normal attic and relive your most cherished and painful memories with your grandpa. Read old letters, pick up objects, and uncover what he has left behind.
Genre: Point & click + Visual novel. Original art, music, and writing.
Please click to advance. To pause, hit "P." To complete the game, you must discover five flashback scenes.
Note: Certain items will trigger flashbacks. You can click on those items a second time for some flavor text.
Sound effects: https://imgur.com/a/yU9O3J6 For inquiries, email emilypitcher8@gmail.com or dm @VolcanoGirlGames on Instagram. A few members of this team are also working on The Space in Between, a free emotional dating sim about Asian American identity, mental health, and stargazing. Click here for our Steam page. Inspired by Gone Home & Super Secret.
For the deaf and hard of hearing community, there is a final monologue that has voice acting but no readable dialogue. To access that, go here once the picture is completed: https://imgur.com/SqmDuPk (Spoilers).
| Youtube | https://volcanogirl.itch.io/anything-for-you |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/anything-for-you |
Ratings
| Overall | 232th | 3.955⭐ | 57🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 764th | 3.373⭐ | 57🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 969th | 3.191⭐ | 57🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 676th | 3.745⭐ | 57🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 136th | 4.348⭐ | 58🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 116th | 4.055⭐ | 57🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 88th | 4.2⭐ | 57🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 74🗳️ | 76🗨️ |
Even though its an "open" game, I guess I fell for clicking the "watch" right after the record player. I assume that is intended as its the most dramatic scene and the first photo piece, after that emotionally charged scene, I wasn't sure I could go on. But after watching the other scenes with that context it drove me to complete the game.
Great way to draw the viewer in, and the "choices" along the way really help you to feel for the protagonist in that situation.
Amazing Job!! :star: :star: :star: :star: :star:
story and atmosphere with this music vibes. Excellent!
As a fan of visual novels, I liked this a lot, and I think I'm going to rate this one very high!
A technical thing: it may be a good idea to disable the choice selection for a second immediately after it pops up, so you don't accidentaly pick something while clicking :slight_smile:
How did you manage to coordinate so many people in a game jam?
In my team we struggle if we're more than 3! :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:
Very good job for a 3 day jam!
curious about what dialogue engine you're using! e.g. Fungus, Yarn Spinner, ink?
Likes:
- Vulnerable, personal look into MC's life. She felt like such a real person and the story felt so personal that I felt like the MC! Or a close friend of hers! <3
- The three dimensionality of the characters. The grandpa wasn't just an evil guy. He shared some good memories with MC.
- The looping aspect as a way of reliving memories
- Certain items trigger memories
- The art!!!!!!!!!!!
Wishes:
- Music and sound slider don't feel linear in changing volume; to get the linear feel use log + see this https://gamedevbeginner.com/the-right-way-to-make-a-volume-slider-in-unity-using-logarithmic-conversion/
- Maybe the ui / visuals could do more to suit the mood? e.g. when grandpa and I are arguing, maybe the font size could be bigger, there could be camera shakes, the sprites could change to show increasing anger, tense pauses, etc. Although this is hard given the constraints :)
- Maybe some similar dialogue options that felt like they led to the same path could be a little more different? E.g. 'baby breath?' vs 'that must smell bad'; 'a parrot' vs 'a fox'
- Wish that if we already saw the dialogue for an item when cleaning it up, show different dialogue
The wishes are just my onion so if yall disagree that's fine! Given the constraints this is super cute, touching, and full of content. I hope this becomes something more! And I hope I can play The Space Between one day :)
As for the dialogue engine, I wrote everything through Twine, and we built a parser that took the HTML file and put it through Unity.
I appreciate your compliments! I'm happy you pointed out that the grandpa felt three dimensional to you, and I'm glad you like the art. We wanted the visuals to match the wholesome parts of the story, which is why we went with that style.
Regarding your wishes, I will be taking these in consideration for my next game. I actually started looking into DOTween once the jam ended because I had the same thought as you for improving the visuals, so I'm already on it.
Again, thank you for your nice comments! I look forward to playing your future games :)
To say a bit about myself, game dev has always been an interest of mine given my love for storytelling, but I never thought I'd be capable of making a good game. I tried to make a dev team once but my members stopped showing, joined teams that went no where, got rejected from countless gaming internships. Early in 2020, I started a team at my game dev club and for the first time, I saw progress. All of that was shattered once covid started, and I had to deal with issues way bigger than making video games.
A month ago, I participated in a student-led informal game jam, and I finished my first game in 48 hours. For years, I've been trying to get an opportunity to make a game, for it to be completed in two days. My first thought was of regret, why couldn't I have done this earlier, I could've been so much farther ahead, etc. But I now realize that all of my failures were so my second finished game could be this special.
Maybe I hadn't made the next Life is Strange, but I narrowed down the type of stories I like to tell, I wrote a lot of bad dialogue (improvement, yay!), and I found creative collaborators I love. I played many beautiful games, I got out and saw the world (just so I could write about it), and I grew a deeper understanding of hurt and loss.
This was a literal essay -- just a huge thanks for leaving such a nice comment. I'll play your game sometime tomorrow!
If there's one gripe, it's that it was sometimes hard to click what I wanted to click one. It might be "fullscreen messing with the cursor" thing, I don't know.
One time, the bike got priority over the "turn to see the next part of the room" arrows. Things like that.
A nice little personal story. Also, coordinating so many people seems like quite the challenge!
I had it all wrong : I immensely enjoyed your game.
:ballot_box_with_check: Start with a relatable premise to save on introduction.
:ballot_box_with_check: Split your story into small chunks, triggered by a light gameplay element
:ballot_box_with_check: Add a few twists and hard scenes here and there
:ballot_box_with_check: Complete the package with awesome art and audio
You did everything right. And I'll be trying my hand at visual novels in LD48 !
Impatient to see what's coming next from you guys (https://twitter.com/spacebtwngame right ?)
Having the items be able to be seen in any order is really daring. Often a storyteller can guide the listener but controlling the rise and fall of action, such as continually going between happy and sad scenes like in To The Moon. But that's the advantage of the game medium isn't it? To give the player some agency in how they approach things. I just went right and clicked things along the way, so it's possible I went through the "intended" path of the story.
I'm a bit glad the story didn't have some sort of super crazy twist. In some ways that can be a crutch that devs can rely on too much instead of just creating interesting characters you can relate to like you did.
That is a huge team that apparently just manifested out of thin air lol (only 1 game). How do you guys know each other and how hard was it to coordinate that many people?
Really nice change of pace from other games I've played this jam, great work!
For me, while I play a huge variety of games (Dota 2, Minecraft, etc.), when I think about the games most special to me, it's always narrative-driven ones. I understand that it's a niche genre for Ludum Dare, but I wanted to tackle it anyway.
I am so flattered by your compliments, and I'm super excited to see your creation in LD 48!
As for the size of my team, we all go to the same college. Half of the members here have never made a game/even opened Unity, which was a challenge as the lead of the project. Delegating tasks was difficult at times cause it was like "Well, hm, you don't particularly know how to do anything with this engine, so what should I assign?" but I think they all learned a lot!
The format was relatively simple here but the choices in the dialogue really helped keep things engaging, even if they were not complicated choices at all. The ending was a nice way to tie things together. I know that you've already provided an alternative for deaf and hard-of-hearing players, but you should probably look into providing subtitles for that scene as well as a nod to accessibility.
The drawing of the emperor was my favorite! Those birds, hahaha
