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Salut Lazlo! Bienvenue à Notgames!

[I'd be extremely interested in getting in touch with people from Montreal or Quebec.]

Salut notgames!

I'm an aspiring game- and hopefully notgame-dev from Montreal, in the French-speaking part of Canada (my English shouldn't be that bad, but please be forgiving of my small missteps). I've been passionate about game development since as far as I can recall; mostly to create worlds for players to explore and interact with. Last year, I started digging around the concept of making art from the same medium as games, and unsurprisingly (it's a small world -- an even smaller field) ended up on Tale of Tales, the RAM and other texts by Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn, and of course this initiative.

I'm boiling with ideas I'd like to attempt, but for now I'm focusing on finishing a traditional game; both as a technical practice and as a trial of my own determination to complete a project. Notgames are however always on my mind, and I'm keeping notes for when I can spare some time to attempt them.

I'd be extremely interested in getting in touch with people from Montreal or Quebec. As active and resourceful this community seems to be, I'd love the exchange and motivation of meeting like-minded aficionados in person. In the mean time, I think I might become quite active around here.

This common exploration is exhilarating -- I found myself reading plenty of posts on this board while awaiting my account approval, always surprised that what I'd want to contribute to the conversation hadn't been already said. There are so many unanswered questions, unsolved problems, unattempted ideas. We are lucky to live in an era on the edge of an entirely new medium, where almost nothing is grounded, standardized, normalized or immovable. I can't wait to start poking around in the dark, and see what lights up.

Thank you Michaël!!

Hello!

I have clicked the YES button. :-)

There seems to be something really interesting here in the repetition.

I'm wondering, how would you make the player feel like they technically have the choice to do things (like leave the house, reach out to people), but don't because they feel too bad, it's overwhelming, etc?  I suppose apathy could also be provoked by screwing with the rewards system, making rewards either not worth the effort or making them seem out of reach.

The art style and environment are pretty great.

Hello, and thank you for taking the time to read and comment!

This is actually a quite complicated issue which I'm still struggling with, I'll try to summarize my reasoning.

The way I'm tackling it right now, is that I'm not aiming to give the player any real choice as of whether or not he wants to stay home / not reach out to people. My take on this is that I have a specific scenario which I want the player to go through, with the hopes of raising awareness for what it can be like to be stuck in such a situation. The alternative might be to give the player the illusion of being able to call friends, family or a similar act of reaching out. The player will most likely try this act at least once, and if he/she realizes that the option is legit that will break the experience as a person with depression wouldn't have such an easy time to reach out to others by him/herself. At the same time, if the player has taken the "reach out" action and the game stops him/her (perhaps by making the main character hesitant or defiant of the action), that might break the illusion of choice completely (if the player sees through it, which will of course depend on the player's experience with games and mechanics) and again the experience is at risk of breaking. In this sense, giving the player the option to "reach out" might have more negative consequences than positive.

I also have a slight (perhaps unfounded) fear that if I make the player actually feel depressed, as opposed to understanding depression and its effects, it might actually affect some players negatively even after they've stopped playing. I feel like I'm walking a thin tightrope, on one side I do want the player to experience what it can be like to live with depression, on the other side I don't want to make the player feel too depressed as it can have negative consequences depending on who is playing. I am sincerely trying to take my responsibility as a creator and focus on what positives I can bring to the player's life, while minimizing the risk of bringing any negatives.

Thank you for commenting on the art style, it means a lot as this is the first game I've ever produced the art assets for myself!

I think I've posted here in the past but never done an introduction.  I've done a lot of short experimental games and notgames, but recently I've been working on my first long-term project in a while.  It's based on time I spent with a brujo in a desert suburb in Peru that was founded by witches during the Inquisition.  The gameplay involves the player wandering the town at night and taking photos, which they then show to NPCs who spin stories about the photos.  The exquisite-corpse-narrative-as-documentary style was inspired by Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Mysterious Object at Noon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mysterious_Object_at_Noon (although my project has spun pretty far off of the documentary/docugame course).  It's kind of a conversational mechanic—the player doesn't talk, but if they want to steer a conversation in a certain direction, then they can take certain types of photos and show them to characters. 

Here's a link to the Greenlight page http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=343303891 with a video trailer.

And here's my main website http://aaronoldenburg.net

- Aaron

There seems to be something really interesting here in the repetition.

I'm wondering, how would you make the player feel like they technically have the choice to do things (like leave the house, reach out to people), but don't because they feel too bad, it's overwhelming, etc?  I suppose apathy could also be provoked by screwing with the rewards system, making rewards either not worth the effort or making them seem out of reach.

The art style and environment are pretty great.

Hello everyone! I was recommended this forum by a friend, as I am working on a title that walks the line between games and interactive entertainment.



The game is called Please Knock on My Door and expresses the subject matter of depression, loneliness and phobia. My hope is that the game will be able to help those who are friends or family to someone suffering from depression to understand what the sufferer's world can be like. I want to raise awareness of this issue, and my hope is that by doing this in the form of an interactive product, the user will be able to explore the subject matter and possibly learn something in the process.

The game is scheduled for an early 2015 release, and I recently released a teaser: http://youtu.be/HhiAtok9dwI

I have looked at both Depression Quest and Actual Sunlight for inspiration, but I'm thinking of doing a more gameplay oriented experience (without breaking immersion of course) than those examples. The difficult part is to portray an illness were one of the most common symptoms is apathy, through an interactive medium. If you have any feedback or other games / interactive experiences you think I should look at based on the above, please let me know!

Also, if you'd like to hear more about my thoughts on PKoMD, just drop a line. I made this initial post more like a short introduction to gauge interest than "throw everything I've got in a wall of text". 

Take care
// Michael

Thanks!

I've tried to put the story out there the way people will experience it ingame, testing the waters to see what people will intuitively get, what they won't and what they'll do research into to figure out. So yea, it's all cryptic out there right now. But essentially, the backstory is centered around the cultural conflict of three nations in an alternate, industrialised, 6th century Europe, told from the perspective of the increasingly megolomanical monuments of the crumbling Roman Republic (Still, barely). Think what newly industrialised Europe was doing with their newfound construction ability, then give that the focus on posterity of Roman monumental architecture. If you look through the screenshots, hopefully you'll notice two distinct architectural styles. I'm still working on the third, but it'll be a little harder than the other two.



Oh, and not everything on my Powerless Inquisitor twitter is Winter related. I'll be tagging further tweets, but in the meantime: https://storify.com/SeventhArrival/for-each-our-roads-of-winter-twitter-teaser-1.

Thanks so much for sharing, this is really helpful