Hamada X Postmortem

Hey all,
This post will be just talking about the game and the jam time (GameZanga).
This year GameTako finds a partner in Egypt (The District) to host the GameZanga event so for the first time I attended GameJam at the venue with other developers. I didn’t only attend the venue, I also volunteered to help to make the GameZanga happen.

This year theme for GameZanga was “Freedom“, so I was thinking what I can do about that, I got an idea about a boy in a room where there is a great watching eye (like eye of Sauron from Lord of the Rings) where it tells the player what to do and what to not do and if the player followed the rules nothing happens but if you decided to break the rules then you advance in the game, its a mixture between Tower of Heaven and Decpit1.

I started drawing the eye, and thinking for a better idea but I didn’t get an idea till Ahmed Saker suggested to collaborate and work on a game. Since Saker uses Unity3D so we decided to use it (it was the first time to use it).

Saker wanted to make a game complicated and contains puzzles like Increpare games, and he wanted really to make a game where all the puzzles lies in the visuals and pattern recognition (like Activate the Three Artefacts and then Leave) but I thought it needs too much time to be finished so we decided to change the idea but keeping in mind to make it a puzzle game.

So I got a great idea what about the game is just something happening in your brain and whenever you fail you loop inside the same room till you changed the way you think to solve the puzzle.

We loved the idea and decided it is the one we want to make, so how that relates to freedom?? any guess??

This is pure Freedom, as we said that the player won’t go out of the room and will loop in it(which have the meaning of following Routine which cause your life (game) boring with no new stuff) if he always restrict his thinking in a particular way, for example you have a poor guy and a rich guy and have two types of food (cheap one and expensive one). The common sense will make you give the cheap food to the poor guy and the expensive food to the rich guy but why you do that because its the normal thing that happens (the word normal thing is against freedom because you put chains on your way of thinking so we want you to free your mind from all chains that is against freedom). So the game will be sequential rooms with doors at the front and end and there is a puzzle in the room if you solved it in normal common sense way the door will open and you will enter and find yourself in same room but if you solved it in the abnormal way you will advance to the next room and so on.

May be someone noticed something that the game is solved in only one path that I had decided will making the game which means that is not Freedom and that was intended as there is nothing called Freedom in my view and Saker view too. Freedom is just a word but in the end everything you do follows certain rules in your brain and never noticed that.

That was the intention of the game and how it is related to Freedom and as I said in the previous post that we only finished a prototype so we didn’t have time for text or making more than one room or anything of these stuffs (we only work for 1 day and half maximum on the game).

Here is a timelapse video:

Here is a link for the Prototype of the game.

That’s everything for now stay tuned for more game releases soon.

Bye Bye

2 thoughts on “Hamada X Postmortem

  1. the concept is sweet but to avoid the “one path” thing try to go with a “obey-disobey” approach but some of the obeys can lead to your death where some of the disobeys you can survive (by fighting something or time puzzles or…) .. i’d love to play something like that where i can take the decision i want and fight through the consequences till the end with a psychological theme.

    good luck guys.

    • Thnx for commenting 🙂 we (ana we saker) had that idea before starting that idea but we threw it away becz we felt it would take lot of time

      The first idea we had was to play with a character where he encountered problems and each problem have a common solution and abnormal solution and each choice led to new state and problems but i think it will so huge that we wont be able to finish it in zanga 🙂 btw ur game is very nice 🙂

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