cslupius 2021-10-05 11:48
I have no idea whats going on... How do I play this game? Do I need someone else? Do I send these back to you? What!?
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD49 → SANCTITY Compliant Yggdrasil Worldship
By alyd-asmar and fae-pdf
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 130 | 4.04 | 25 | |
| Fun | 478 | 3.65 | 25 | |
| Innovation | 5 | 4.54 | 25 | |
| Theme | 575 | 3.71 | 25 | |
| Graphics | 989 | 3.33 | 23 | |
| Humor | 179 | 3.88 | 24 | |
| Mood | 26 | 4.43 | 25 |
I have no idea whats going on... How do I play this game? Do I need someone else? Do I send these back to you? What!?
I awake in a bright room, in a pool of my own humanity. Faithless and itchy, I run my hands over the smooth and lavender scented walls. They must know of the gardening.. and the birds. The holy texts carved into my flesh offer no solace. I am a hollow vessel for the grey light but most importantly, no gormlins shall touch me. Nothing matters now I can only fly I can share it with noone it's beautiful the pictures of nature melt on my tongue I repent I repent I repent I repent i repent irepetnirepentirepentireptnirepent
@cslupius This is interactive fiction, but in the medium of physical forms that you will fill to play the game. The questions are usually multiple choice, and can have some mechanical effects depending on your answers (there will be instructions to follow).
If you have played text-based games before, like twine games for instance, this is similar, except instead of following hyperlinks, you tick boxes. You are the one who gets to decide the content of your adventure. Every time you have boxes to check, you get to decide for yourself what is true and what is not.
You can share the content of your experience, and you can send these back to us, if you want! But you don't need to do that. And you don't need anyone else to play; this is entirely a single player experience. You're a character in the game's world that wakes up, and find forms they have to fill. Life has happened to them before, and happens to them in between the forms, and is implied by the text and created by your decisions.
It's a text-based aid to telling a story to yourself. Like maybe you used to do, or still do, before going to sleep. Maybe like a choose your own adventure book. You have to work a little bit for it to function, because you're the machine running the game, but I hope for some people it will be worth it :)
@peterfiftyfour thank you so very much for playing our game! I hope it was a good/interesting experience for you, I loved reading your comment!! <3
@fae-pdf I love this very much! It is utterly compelling. I have no idea how you came up with this or where you drew your inspiration from (other than the Norse connection) but like the bird theme?? It almost feels like it's ai generated or ai assisted because of some of the unusual word choices. Do you have any other work for me to peruse?
@peterfiftyfour Thank you so so much! <3
Well, I'd say the AI is me :D The idea of a form-based game came from my co-writer right at the start of brainstorming (which wasn't of much use since we just went with it), who just has a brilliant mind for concepts and weird bullshit.
The inspirations are hard to decipher because it's just a melting pot of things melded into an undistinguishable, half-alive mass, but I think the main ones for this would be a bunch of ttrpg rules documents where you build your character through these kind of questions (the stuff by John Harper in particular) (I have an immoderate love for loaded questions) and text based interactive fictions, like the works of porpentine. (Check out http://slimedaughter.com/games/twine/timetossed/ , the mad woman made a tiny game in google forms.)
Otherwise, it was all improvised with my co-writer. I started with a very basic outline of the plot and no worldbuilding, and played it by ear as I wrote. While creating the items on the first form, I felt weirdly, utterly compelled to put the skull of a very small bird in there, and it all came naturally from then on, by building on the strange things Then it was all callbacks from there, building upon my co-writer's ideas... I love this kind of, letting a story and world grow organically.
I don't have much in a similar vein that I could show you yet. You could check https://chimyx.itch.io/ariel-cleanomancer , that we made for the last LD, or a weird poetry collection I wrote last year https://faeexe.itch.io/postcards . I've also written a ttrpg with a lot of loaded questions like that, https://faeexe.itch.io/the-warlord , but it hasn't been playtested yet. It's got cute mice in it and nothing weird at all, though.
DUDE!!! HOW IN THE WORLD DID YOU COME UP WITH THIS CONCEPT? This is so cool, oh my god!! and in a game jam, no less?! love the story telling medium, love the prose, love everything about this. fantastic work.
So first of all, I love the worldbuilding that went into this project. The imagery is extremely evocative. I wish there were a way to play this without printing out the forms. ALSO: the fact that all of the forms are buried in different folders, with different names for the folders and only a few items in each folder makes me think that the electronic experience was intended. After all, if it were just supposed to be a paper experience, the forms would all have boring names and they would all be at the same level in the folder structure.
So I didn't print the forms. I just opened the folders and started browsing. The folders display in alphabetical order, which means the first folder that appears is DON'T OPEN UNLESS DEVIANT. Naturally, I opened that folder first and read the contents therein. I wish I hadn't read that folder first...I think this experience would have been improved if I had known what I was deviating against first. So, I would bury that sort of material inside of other folders so that anyone who gets the electronic-only experience would need to actually dig through to get to it.
Anyway, eventually I realized I was supposed to start with the "START HERE" file rather than just opening each folder alphabetically and reading the PDFs inside, and my experience was much improved.
I would have loved there to be more branching options for what forms to fill out next, rather than always just having to go to the next one and then the next one. For example, in the very first form, the only instruction I found was "If you have ever been convicted of crimes," etc. But what if I have never been convicted of crimes? I found myself with no option but to assume I have committed a crime and to open that form to continue the game.
Searching for the YBK form was a little annoying, since it wasn't obvious that it was in the FOR YOUR EYES ONLY folder. It forces you to open every folder and search for it. Not sure if that was intended. I would have liked a folder structure system where all of the folders were the first three letters of a form name. So the outsider folder would be YBK, and then inside the folder there would be YBK-001, YBK-253, and other YBK forms. Et cetera.
Eventually, I ended up at ODB-WR, which referred to a form PAS-S. I could not find PAS-S. I'm not sure if there's any way to reach the other forms, except to deviate.
Anyway, I hope this wall of text tells you that I really loved the world-building, which is why I wanted to come up with all these improvements. Other than that, since this game was so text-based, I wish it had more of an edit. Things like inconsistent hyphenation of non-compliant or some items having periods at the end while other items didn't really brought me out of the world. But eh, such are the constraints of time.
@peterfiftyfour @skullsprigs We hereby acknowledge the reception of your five-stars LD [49] jam forms. Thanks a lot for testing our game, reading your comments has warmed my heart. For your information, @fae-pdf and I didn't even have the time to test it yet so you're the first people to play it. Since you're still alive and seem satisfied, we'll take that as a positive sign for our administrative syste- ahem. For our game.
"I wake up in a hospital room, there's so much light coming from the windows I can't distinguish the color of the walls. I start filling the medical form but I'm quite hypochondriac so I stop reading at purple veins while my hands are going numb and a cold sweat invades me. I look around the room, but I only see an empty plastic bottle of water. Great, now I'm thirsty. I don't see any skull of a small bird though, and that comforts me. I leave the room to find a nurse, but the corridor is empty. There's only a wall-fixated phone and a small book on it, which won't open. The phone starts ringing, but I decide to ignore it. If I don't know where I am, how does anyone else know? It's probably not for me. And so I continue my walk, through the sanitized corridor, while wondering why am I carrying the skull of a small bird..."
I looved the experience! I hadn't played/read one of these 'Choose your own adventure' games in maybe ten years! I'll continue with the next forms, but just wanted to congratulate you both for the submission. Great work :)!
@carraka Oh, shit! You're right, the name of the PAS-S form was changed but it wasn't update in the file. I think you're perfectly right about the game flow, I'm going to try to change that a bit. The FOR YOUR EYES ONLY folder was added because a friend tried to play it and went to the YBK form immediately after the W [21-24] because it was in the root folder, and he wanted to roleplay that he hadn't been convicted, as you point out.
Indeed, I want to add more branching options very badly! I've even started working on other ID forms and the PBS forms that should go with them. I very much intend to keep working on it and put out improved versions at later dates.
Admittedly, there is some "debugging" to be done, thank you so so much for your feedback and the UX pain points you've pointed, I'm going to work on fixing them. And, that's a very good idea about the folder structure, I'm going to do something like that I think!!
I love that you naturally opened the "DON'T OPEN UNLESS DEVIANT" folder first, that's such a mood. Thank you so much, it's all so helpful. And it makes me so happy you liked the worldbuilding!
Also the folder structure is a remediation to the name of certain forms, which I consider to be kind of spoilery, like the one you opened first. But you're entirely right that giving them weird names goes contrary to that, I didn't realise that it was a conflicting design decision!
@skullsprigs Thank you so very much! Reading your comment, I hear my heart sing from the small pencil box I keep it in. I hope you have a great day! <3
I have taken inventory of my surroundings. There are, in fact, two small bird skulls in the room with me. They are still housed within living birds, but they are there. I would prefer that they remain there.
@carraka I have, as of now, updated the game to v1.1. I fixed some problems with consistency (although I'm pretty sure I've missed a lot), the borked connexion between ODB-WR and GBR-A, and most importantly the file structure. If you have time, if you feel like it, if you want to, you might check it out. No matter what, thanks again, and I hope you have a great day! <3
Updates with more branches might trickle in soonish, but they'll be a separate "build" marked as such because I believe they're non-compliant with the good behavior rules of the holy LUDUM DARE.
A lot of people who submit unconventional entries rely on the novelty of the respective mediums themselves to carry their projects, but Sanctity succeeds in this front where others fail. Ironically, this pen-and-paper adventure is endlessly more engaging than many traditionally interactive games in this jam. Very excited to see future projects from this pair of creators - collaborative or otherwise.
This is amazing! Really creative concept and executed perfectly. The only thing I'd suggest is maybe updating the part on this page about requiring a printer to match what you wrote on the itch.io page: while a printer definitely makes the game easier, it's totally doable with a PDF reader and some Sanctity-Compliant markup, lol
Great game. It was very interesting and funny to play
This was super cool! Like other say a bit shorter with more branching would have been cool so i could play through a few times and see different results. And I had a wierd thought of maybe a spotify playlist to listen to while you fill it in might have been a fun way to set a mood. I was listing to some sythwave during and thought it added to the vibes. But all in all I was blown away. Well done!
Amazing experience! I'm just in awe... The creativity shown in the worldbuilding and storytelling is special on its own, but the way you delivered it through forms is something else. So impressive!
This is the best submission here and I mean that. Awesome concept, insanely innovative. Really gets the theatre of the mind going. The fact that you somehow made filling in forms so interesting is astonishing. Amazing experience all around, Well fucking done.
This game is so innovative! You just created a full world and narrative through forms, it isn't a easy task at all. I don't have real feedback to give to you cause i'm not good at writing, but I can confirm you that for me this was an unusual but unforgettable experience.
Thank you for making this, I found myself thinking about it long after I had gone through the forms. The medium is really unique but it feels "real" as those could be artifacts from that universe.