CONSCIOUSNESS IN A JAR, the weirdest game i've made so far !

Context (French guy here, sorry for my bad english !)

Being a dad can be quite challenging when it comes to participating in game jams. I use to be a young jam adventurer who would spent 48/72 hours making a game. Now…it’s a little more challenge to organise myself in jams with my family.

So i started the LUDUM DARE with the joy of making something new and the fear that i wouldn’t be able to have the time to do what i specifically had in mind. I wouldn”t do something i couldn’t be proud of, something dull, and wouldn’t sacrifice my time with my daughter either.

So the entire work on this game was mostly during my daughter naps and, well, at night.

I wanted this game to have a strong gamefeel, a strong backstory with an emotional plot twist. I knew i wouldn’t have time to code advanced mechanics so i just made a game when trying to control the player was the main challenge. After consideration, maybe too hard because most of players won’t finish the game because of this…

SPOILER ALERT HERE I wanted a end that would impact the player. So i started to think about the end first. A child trapped inside his/her head because of an accident. A father guilt-ridden and a bitter brain. Dr.Brain would be bitter because brains HAVE to have control over things and the fact that he can’t drove him crazy. He began to get mad to the wrong “person” : consciousness. Once Dr. Brain was defined, i thought Guilt would be the key to the understanding of the game itself and the “why Consciousness would be trapped here in the first place”.

Then i though : “they say that people in Coma could here everything”. Everything since then would be pretty obvious for me : There would be things in the real world transcripted in the child’s head. The music in the room had to play a role. Debussy’s Clair de Lune is one of my favorite music and was perfect for the role. I added a “low-pass effect” to make it sound far away, blurred and in the end, removed the effect in the real world. Imaginary friend would be bringing his/her cuddy toy to life and Guilt would be the materialisation of the father crying that it was all his fault.

For this matter, i wanted to be sort of unclear about what really brought the child to coma and what really was the reason of his guilty conscience. A father has thousands reasons to feel guilty about anything that happens to his child even if it’s not his fault in most of the cases. It all returns to one thing : AGENCY or more like the LOSS of AGENCY.

MISTAKES WERE MADE…AGAIN I spent around 15 hours making the game. In the last hours, i tried to solve a bug. Of course, i solved it and created a bigger one without noticing it. People would now get stuck if they come to close to an box cliff… This ridiculous “isGrounded” bug block the player and kill the game. I’m sooooo frustrated about that but HEY that’s game jams right ? Making stupid rushed choices and regret them for life lol !

Hope you liked the game !

Cheers !