The font I selected - Pinyon Script - reminds me of my grandparents’ handwriting, moulded into a slanted script by the French education system of the 1950s. On my mother’s side, my left-handed grandfather was forced to write with his left hand tied behind his back.
I used A Dialogue Box by Divirad for displaying text within the game.
A few years ago, my brother received a telescope for his birthday, and I’m very grateful he did. Last summer, we brought it to les PFs, and on a hot night we walked barefoot to the tarmac road on the hill above my grandparent’s house. The asphalt was still warm from the sunlight of a few hours prior. We found Saturn, and through this low-magnification telescope we were able to make out the rings. What a gut-wrenching moment, to see with my own eyes the reality of this other world.
The existential importance of this moment was countered by the banality of operating the telescope: Mamie making good-natured comments, the pain of the rough asphalt on my knees as I knelt, and mainly: the permanent tremble and sway of the telescope lens, trying to stay focused on Saturn as the Earth rotates and my fingers shake.
I wanted to make a game representing this experience. I was inspired by small vignette-type games that tell a story, particularly Turnfollow’s games: Packing Up the Rest Of Your Stuff On the Last Day at Your Old Appartment, and Little Party. These are games that tell small stories in a confined space, in a way that really inspired me.
I was also inspired by games such as Cosmo D’s Tales From Off-Peak City, Connor Sherlock’s Walking Simulator A Month Club, and Bernband. More so than some better known ‘walking simulators’ (What Remains of Edith Finch), These games emphasise the interest in walking around more than anything. The primary aim is exploring a world.
This mostly gave me an excuse to record my grandparents, draw this place I love, make some music, and learn to code.
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"The best place to hang out is somewhere you discover yourself" - Everest PipkinPipkin, my favourite artist and game designer, explores this idea in the games they create: one game which remains particularly inspiring to me is The Ground Itself , which is a paper-based worldbuilding game about telling the stories of a place over time. This ‘game’ functions like a framework, like an encouragement, to tell stories with friends, stories which you feel belong entirely to you. This sense of belonging, which is so proper to games, is also in my opinion one of the most beautiful things about games.
Games like mine don’t create this sense of belonging; players are presented with someone else’s creation, and aren’t so much encouraged to create something of their own within it. That’s alright; not every game needs to have these properties, but I’d like to experiment with creating blank canvases for people to fill rather than just completed paintings for people to look at.
I would like to take inspiration from The Ground Itself, and create a game around which people can create spaces and stories, a game that functions as encouragement, a game that wants to be modified and played according to its players’ whims.