Ludography: Game Jams

Metro Mori is a first-person narrative game about negotiating the afterlife, which turns out to be a multi-lingual metro system. Meet other wanderers on their own quests for understanding, happy endings or intervention, and see what conclusions might also await you.

Developed during Train Jam 2017 (theme: ‘unexpected anticipation’) with:

Ahmed Elgoni (programming),
Innes McKendrick (programming & technical art),
Isaac Karth (3D & technical art),
Giulia Yamazaki (2D art),
Izzy Gramp (art),
Elie Abraham (theme music) and
Bradford Dobbs (soundscapes).

My contributions: game concept (with Innes), narrative design & scripting, level design & transit map, accessibility oversight
Tools: Twine (& Yarn), Unity 3D, Google Sheets, Adobe Illustrator
Platforms: PC

Play

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7cLD1J7rUA

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Ardo is an adventure game which explores anxiety and culture shock from moving to a foreign land. You play as the new arrival in a village where the residents dress differently to you, and speak an unfamiliar language made up of glyphs. You must take in the surroundings, be bold, and try to learn their ways whilst they might one day, in turn, come to learn yours.

We developed and presented a short proof-of-concept demo during Splash Jam in 2016. The team included myself, Skully Brookes (programming), Rikke Jansen (art), Bendik Høydahl (SFX & VFX) and Almut Schwache (music). The game is played using a Playstation 4 controller, whose icons form the basics of Ardo‘s 12-character language.

My contributions: game concept, language & scenario design, UI assets

Dev tools: Google Sheets, Adobe Photoshop

Platforms: PC, Mac (requires a game controller)

On-rails: Train Jam 2017

26 March, 201726 March, 2017
Events, Ludography: Game Jams

Last month and for the first time, I was honoured to be able to attend Train Jam: the annual, trans-American game jam event which now drops an entire train-load of developers in San Francisco, just in time for GDC. I did so courtesy of the event’s diversity initiative, for which I am extremely grateful. As anyone who knows me personally (and a few who don’t) will have noticed: trains and game jams are kind of my thing.

My usual custom for game jam wrap-ups like this is to go in-depth on some of the lessons learned, explain a bit about the game we made, and try to keep aspects of the journey or the setting either in their own post, or confined within my Flickr gallery. With Train Jam more than most jams though, I feel as though the journey contributed too much to the process to be taken in isolation. So, now that I’ve finally been able to sift through my photographs from this long weekend in the United States, it’s time for a ‘read more’ jump: