Definition of a Ghuest
Hello dear Ludum Darers! 😊
What a weekend! It's been a year since we took part in our first Ludum Dare together, and we've made so much progress in finding the style of games we wanna make! Let's talk a bit about our entry, Definition of a Ghuest 💜
Our first LD game was The Cashbags Man, it'a hotel simulation where you check in guests in the Brownie Cove Hotel, you had text choices to make, leading to different things happening [and in the Post-Jam version that we are releasing very soon, several endings!]. The choices you made had an impact, our story file contained a lot of variables. We still like this game, and we're still proud of what we did back then, we went down a quite different road after that...
We then made Between Stations, where you watch TV in your hotel room... at the Brownie Cove Hotel. You turn on your TV, and you go through the channels, hidden in the static. They were like a dozen of channels, with different unrelated stories. You still had different choices to make, but they had a very small impact of the stories, sometimes changing the following text, but most of the time they were just there to add variations to how you perceived it all. Some people liked it, some people didn't:
And this time we've been doing Definition of a Ghuest. It’s a game about a film about an art piece about a hotel (guess which one ;) ). We won't spoil you too much on this one but I just leave a part of our game page here: "We interpreted the theme as a transfer of one medium into another… i.e. an installation piece remade as a documentary, or a film being viewed within a video game. What is gained and what is lost when two incompatible mediums collide?"
It was our first real 3D project (hence why we don't participate in Graphics category, we're not 3D artists and we used hotel assets and cars from the Asset Store), and it was maybe the most gameplay-esque thing we did, I mean we've got several cameras, a controller you can move around, we use the mouse, the keyboard... However, this may be our most "passive" game, striving further away from games like Telltale games where you're the hero of the game, here you just happen to watch it and merely try to have an impact on it... I'll stop there but if you're interested in thoughts about player agency and games as a medium, I'd suggest this great blog post by Sam. We tried to warn people beforehand so they know what they get into, so we hope it will be easier to appreciate than Between Stations.
