My weird little point and click game (Patreon)

I decided to make a little point and click game and make it like my own personal game jam. Here it is in case you haven't played it. It is very short. https://zeekerss.itch.io/take-your-wish

I have always wanted to make a creepy, atmospheric point and click exploration game similar to Myst; that wish of mine goes back to the time before I had finished a single game in Roblox. This is not that. This is more of a small experiment. (That dream game is probably Welcome To The Dark Place, even though it's not a point and click; text-based game systems have a similar effect to them. But I'm getting off-track.)

So why did I make this game?

Uh, for fun?

Well, I felt very inspired to try making a game with point and click presentation using pre-rendered graphics, to achieve the uncanny valley. And I thought it would be easy.

It didn't work as well as I hoped--mainly cause I didn't have the time to add some features such as being able to turn the lights on and off (which would have affected the background ambience, like scaring away ghosts). And it probably would have been better to choose a brighter, more public setting for the game to make the lack of motion and life in the visuals a bit more obvious and disturbing.

But working on this mini project gave me plenty of other ideas, and I learned a lot about Blender. I also learned that FMV (full motion video) is a finicky thing in Unity and flat out doesn't work on some systems. 

The process of connecting a bunch of pre-rendered images was very similar to the process I used in Welcome To The Dark Place to connect 'text nodes', so that wasn't too challenging. But it gave me a new appreciation for pre-rendered games like Myst and Riven, the latter of which required rendering over 5000 images to accommodate its ridiculously complex puzzles, which make persistent changes to the world that you can see from many angles. It takes an astounding amount of coordination to put that together.

The most important result, though, was that I am now eager to resume work on Lethal Company since I've now gotten this other idea out of the way.

As for the meaning of the game: it's about the forces of the world driving me and assigning me a fake sense of identity to base my dreams and aspirations on. 

This story and ending feels like a downer, but I really just came up with it on the fly, so I'm not super invested in fixing it. Adding anything to the game would require increasing its scope way too much. I'm going to take this experience and move on!