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Tachycardia
GAMEPLAY
The jam theme "countdown" immediately reminded me that a human heart beats about 2,5 billion times during a lifetime. If your heatbeats run out you loose the game. The player character is a stuffed toy inside a traumatized childs nightmare so scary - it could kill them.. To save the child you have to end the nightmare. Finding a stuffed toy replenishes heartbeats and encountering scary events such as ghosts, crows or the sound of gunfire will cause your heatrate to go up. There is a calming bonfire which will lower you heartrate back to a resting pace. Once you retrieve four stuffed toys you will trigger the good ending. The narrative wrapper was influenced by my exposure to news coverage of the events in Gaza and an image by Alex Panagopoulos of a teddybear fighting a dragon while a child sleeps. Ranked top 17% in narrative and top 30% in creativity
Role & duties
— Programmer: character controller, interactions, enemies, fear-mechanic, minimap with fog-of-war.
— Art: modeling, texturing, UV-mapping, 2d art, custom shaders.
— Sound and narrative design.
DESIGN CHALLENGES
Solo developing something with a strong atmosphere in a matter of days is always a challenge. I attempted to make the gameplay easy with some friction to hopefully have players reach the good-ending on the first try but still feel like a bit of struggle. I chose an art-style which would be easily reproducable and childish - arts and crafts which is why everything cardboard to match the color scheme of the main character.
