First of all, thank you to everyone who decided to give this game a try. 

To be honest, this was the first time I've felt so anxious about publishing a game because it's a topic that has affected me in some way or another, perhaps all my life. Perhaps this is the reason I never really marketed it or talk about it as heavily as my other games, keeping it under wraps and wraps of silence that not even most of my friends know that I'm making this game until the final days before release.

 There's a funny disparity where I want people to see this and understand it, and yet I'm absolutely terrified of clicking that publish button.

 This is probably the most vulnerable piece of media I've ever written and published publicly. It is also perhaps one of my longest pieces. (My other games barely cross the 1k word mark, after all) So if you decided to give this a try, I truly, truly want to say thank you. This may not be my most impressive game or my most polished, but it is dear to my heart.

Anyway, enough about that, let's talk about the game, shall we?

Warning: This text contains spoilers for the game, I highly reccommend you don't read this before playing if you don't want to be spoiled.

Kafka's "Metamorphosis"

Of course, this all started with Kafka's Metamorphosis. Re-reading it mere days before the jam started, I can't help but wish that Gregory Samsa had a different ending. Where he lived as he liked, where he didn't have to die. One where he escaped. One where he may even have had a pillar of support, however small. I talked to this to a small number of friends and they gave me the push I needed to actually make this game and give this version of him a different ending- or several different endings, even.

From here, I thought about what I wanted the thesis statement of this game to be. I wanted it to be about being not-quite-human in a way that is inevitable, and impossible to hide. This is a game about being dehumanized for one reason or another. But it is also about reaching out to others and learning to communicate. It is about finding community, even if that community is just one person who doesn't quite understand, but is doing their best to. It's about leaving home and finding a new one. It's about giving people a chance, regardless of the hurt. 

For this reason, I actually started by writing down all the different endings of the game, and walked back from there to see how the characters would reach it. For this reason, I gave the main character three different stats in this game:

• Self: How does the MC feel about himself? Does he wish to go back to his old self?
• Affection: Does he manage to create a connection with someone?
• Grudge: Does he hold contempt for the people who abandoned him?

These three factors affected how he saw himself and the people around him and decides a lot of the possible branches and endings of the game, each stat also affects how much of the others you could gather which makes the branching system of this game quite complicated, but also let folks experience and get to the endings in many different ways.

As an example, if you have less than a certain amount of affection points, You will be locked out of an some interactions, making certain endings harder to achieve. On other occassions, having a high grudge will unlock new actions that are not otherwise available. Taking the old skin with you will allow you to interact more with certain characters and story, at the cost of losing one point for Self.  There is no one true way to 100% the game.

Thisis perhaps one of the most complicated branching system I've made in a game, but it was a lot of fun to plan and make. I'd love to make more games with this level of complexity in the branching again in the future.

Boiling down the characters

I wanted the general plot of the story to remain the same, with some of the same beats as the original story, but as you have noticed, I did change the characters a bit. I didn't want to have to write in as many characters as the original because well, it's a game jam. I don't have time for that. But also I didn't feel the need to have all them. Instead, I looked at the story and boiled down the different people in Metamorphosis, as well as wha t I'd like to take from it. What roles do they hold? How do their interactions differ to each other? What kind of characters I would need? The list comes down to three characters:

1. A character who believes that the main character is a lost cause
2. A bystander, who- while doesn't immediately write him off, does not really put in the effort to try and understand, instead just wishing for normalcy
3. A blank slate who could either follow the other two, or learn to understand you if you tried to form a connection with them.

I guess it's pretty easy to tell which character is which when broken down this way, but that's how I narrowed down the number of characters in the game by the roles they play.

Of course, there's also the main character who is illustrated in first person, written in second person, and technically could have been anyone, any age, any gender. But instead, I've decided to have the characters refer to the main character in a certain way, assigning a gender and a familial role, age and all, even if that may not fit the players who are interacting with it. This character is you and yet it is very obviously not really you. This was indeed a conscious choice to hammer in the fact that you as both the in-game character, as well as the player, isn't the same person that the other characters are talking about. I don't know if I pulled it off perfectly or if any of that previous rambles makes sense, but at least that was my intentions :p

Anyway, if you reached this far, have this funni lil sketchie:

(Yea. Maisie cut her hair after moving out c: )