Last week-end, I made a game for Ludum Dare 26. It was the first game I ever finished, except it wasn’t really a game.

The theme was “minimalism”, and I had absolutely no idea how to exploit it. But it clearly was the best theme ever for a first time.

The first idea I came up with was about a path leading to some kind of monolith. Maybe it was because I’ve been playing Xenosaga Episode I, but I just couldn’t forget this almost clear image, so I had to use it somehow.

The first iteration consisted in some sort of platform game, with moving and rotating platforms that would lead to the monolith, but it was really classic, and boring, and I thought it lacked of something… so I threw it all, and I worked on the second iteration all saturday afternoon. This one was waaay more simple, but it was the almost exact expression of what I had imagined in the first place.

I’ve always had imagination, but I was never able to express it. I’ve tried writing, drawing, painting… but nothing would ever come out the way I imagined it. So, you can imagine how happy I was to finally see something that matched what I wanted.

But then what? Well, I must say I don’t really know what happened, or how it happened, but I came up with this abstract experience that would represent life, or at least my way of seeing it.

At first, you ended up being on this platform, with those forms on the sides and this monolith, you could walk everywhere (and fall… so I add to add collision walls), the sphere and the cube would start to get animated, and that was it. So I added messages.

The first one was “You must leave everything”, and the cube would go up and down, as if it was endlessly falling. This was meant to represente physical posession and some other things.

The second message to appear was “You must forget everything”, while the sphere would start to pulsate and a heartbeat sound would appear. It represented the feelings: love.

Then you’d continue to walk towards the monolith, and it would end with you looking up with a last message: “Press Enter if you are ready.”
Doing so would make the title screen appear with the title: “Life”. An indication to “Press Enter to continue” figured on the bottom center of the screen, and pressing enter would restart the game. That was it.

But being able to move and look around felt wrong, so I ditched the Unity’s default Character Controller package and I wrote my own script, deciding that the player would only be able to go forward. I thought it would be useful to give some indications of what the player can do, even if the game was awfully simple, so I added a message at the beginning (“You can only go forward.”) and with that my “game” was finished.

That’s only a day later that I understood that adding that message was the best thing I could do. When you play the first time, it’s just a simple tutorial message, but when you play a second time, it can mean something else: “You have to move on.”

That’s exactly what I wanted my game to reflect, because no matter what happens in your life, moments will always replace other moments; you’ll have to leave places or objects you hold dear in your heart, you’ll love and you’ll leave or be left, but then you’ll do it again, and again, and again…
Discovering that, I knew I had put myself into this thing in more ways than I had thought.

And some people seemed to understand it; or at least understand something in it. But mostly everybody told me that my game was lacking of gameplay or that it wasn’t really a game (which I totally understand), so I guess it’s more like some kind of interactive experience.
But yeah, some people seemed to like it, and my game even had the honor of being listed on Indie Statik, the author of the article referring to it in rather kind and positive words.

So, in the end, even if my interpretation of “minimalism” wasn’t quite what people seemed to want, and if it’s not even really a game, I’m proud of it. Plus, the message it carries is exactly what I needed myself, so it unexpectedly managed to help me.

Making games as a therapy, why not? So, thanks Ludum Dare, and congratulations for everybody who won just by making a game! :]

Remember: you can only go forward.

(Originally posted here.)