The project
Decide your fate and create something beautiful in this series of meaningful choices.
This game was made for the Indiecade Hidden Heroes game jam. We had to pick our hidden hero and make a game for them. I decided to pick my parents and make a game about my little sister. Loss can be hard, but together we can overcome it.
It’s a simple game where you make 9 different choices deciding what your life will be like (each choice representing 1 month of growth by the unborn baby you are playing as).
People praised the game for its simplicity as well as its ability to make someone emotional after only 10 minutes of gameplay.
The game won first place overall in the jam, and also won the award for student game of the year 2023 in the Belgian game awards!
My work
The entire game was made by me over the course of one school week. I worked on it every evening after school work was done.
I made the game by myself over the course of 1 week. Here is a quick overview of the main things I was able to learn while making this project:
- Scoping:
This remains a difficulty for every project I work on. I think I am getting a lot better at it though. The scope of this game was just right, giving me enough time for general polish. - Music:
This is the first game that features a soundtrack I made myself. More about it in the music tab of this section. - Balancing work and free time projects:
I made this project during a class week. While I can push myself to work extra for a project I am really passionate about, I need to watch out to not go too much into overdrive. I definitely felt the effect of this project in the weeks after.
For the jam, we were required to pick a hidden hero and make a game for them. A hidden hero is an older person you really look up to. The first people to enter my mind were my parents. I decided to make a game about my little sister, who unfortunately passed away in 2006 right after birth.
I always feel really bad for her, because she was ready for life but never got to experience it. I wanted to give the player the same feeling after playing the game.
Coincidentally, a few months before the jam, I had this idea of a comedic character creator game. The game would have a narrator constantly ridiculing you for making bad decisions. This idea fit the theme I wanted perfectly, so I decided to use it for the jam. The game would be a more serious version of that character creator where the character dies at the end.
Weirdly, the first thing I started making for the jam was music. This is because I wanted to do the music myself and I had never done that before. I had a big question mark over this, so I decided to just start with that.
I used FL studio to write and mix the music. I learnt a lot about both the software and the music composition. I also got some great feedback on the music from my friend Tijmen Matthys.
I had this idea of making the soundtrack adaptive to the gameplay.
The more choices the player makes, the more euphoric the music becomes. I decided to split the soundtrack up into tracks that can all be overlayed on top of each other.
In Unity, I then made them play from the start of the game at 0 volume. When I wanted a track to play, I just made the volume slowly rise up for a nice fade effect.
I wanted to go for a childlike drawing art style. The buttons in the game all have different drawings made in that style. I made the lines of the drawings vibrate to give a hand drawn feel to them. I also gave the icons little animations when hovering the mouse over them.
The background in the game is based on the little dots you see when closing your eyes (at least, I see them… Are those normal?). I also added a foetus in the background that grows with each question answered (to show the passage of the months).
I also wanted to focus a lot on the feel and polish of the game. I added particles to the buttons and the background. I gave some fade-in and -out effects to the text and buttons.
The game was made using the Unity game engine. This was the first game where I was able to apply some knowledge learnt during the platform development 3 course at Howest DAE. This was really fun.
I decided the different choices you are able to make in the game together with my mom (since the jam encouraged working together with your hidden hero). I also got some writing feedback (and a lot of spelling corrections 😊 ) from my friends Thomas and Gust.
Credits
