This past weekend was the Global Game Jam — folks all around the world built 300 games in 48 hours! It was awesome. I didn’t participate, but I did hang out at the Boston game jam site.
My favorite of the games made here in Boston, and one that I feel needs to be exposed to the gaming public, is Move Mouse to Fulfill Destiny. If you’re the kind of person who likes to explore game systems without having them explained to you, you should probably just go play it and skip the rest of my post (or come back to it after playing and see if your interpretation is at all like mine). UPDATE: Dan just posted the game on his website so you don’t have to download/install it to play.
The idea is that you’re a farmer, and the game takes place over the span of a lifetime, which runs its course as a song. The seasons, represented by the background color, move “slowly” at first (one season every two seconds or so) and then really fast by the end.
The only interaction is moving your mouse, to divide your time between the fields in the upper left, the back yard in the upper right, and your home in the lower right. Generally speaking, you can plant stuff in the fields in the spring, tend them in the summer, and harvest them in the fall. By building stuff in your backyard, you can increase your crop yield, and thus the amount of food in your house. Food can be used to entertain the visitors who come to your home.
The change of pace in the seasons is supposed to mimic how the years go slow as a kid but fly by as an adult. You spend the years sort of frantically balancing your work life and your home life. There’s other stuff that can, and does, happen. And there’s a pretty complex AI running some of the different friend agents. And the music is excellent, it totally sets the mood.
And I expect there to be lots of comparisons to The Marriage, mostly because this game also appears to be about interacting with squares.
Anyway, go play Move Mouse to Fulfill Destiny. Like all Global Game Jam games, it’s open source so you can play around with the code if you like!
Credits for the game:
Dan Roy (MIT Education Arcade) – Programming, Design, Art
Will Jennings – Programming, Design, Art
Filippo Beck Peccoz – Music
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I uploaded the game to my site, so you don’t have to download/install it to play:
http://dan.roy.name/games/movemouse/index.html
Move Mouse to Fulfill Destiny sounds like a cross between Agricola and Passage. If it is, then I’m sure I’ll enjoy it and need to play it immediately. =D
That was the one I voted for. It’s like hyper Harvest Moon.
Worth mentioning that all the Game Jam games can be played in under 5 minutes (that was one of the constraints). So anyone worried that there are a daunting number of games to play from the event… they’re like bite-size candies, just have one and you’ll be done with the whole bag before you know it :)
So Darius, any reason there isn’t a game with your name on it? Or is there?
Ian, it’s become very hard for me to dedicate a whole weekend to ANYTHING. I am coming to deeply regret not working on a game, though.
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