I’ve gotten some questions lately about the gun in Grief. The general consensus is that Company was a quiet, thoughtful game, so why is the sequel going to be a mindless shooter oh god it’s going to be horrible why oh why is it a shooter?
To sum things up, Grief isn’t a shooter. Grief is a puzzle game. There are no enemies to shoot. The gun ends up being purely a tool that you use in solving puzzles.
Aside from the game mechanics involved, having it be a gun is pretty important to the mood of the game. The second chapter in Grief is Anger, and this is when Henry gets his pistol. He’s frustrated with everyone and wants to feel powerful–A pistol sums that up in one concise package. The real trick is going to be making sure that getting a gun feels like an important event, like it would be in real life. Having a gun in a video game is often par for the course, so there’s no real impact when you get one. In Grief, we’re going to have to set this up thoughtfully enough to make it feel genuine.
Substantial, empowering, and most importantly, somewhat dangerous.
As a side note, I’m back to work on You Find Yourself In A Room. It’s not going to be entered in the JayIsGames contest, because A) it would be disqualified anyway, and B) I already missed the deadline. The demo for that one is updated with some actual content. There are just three simple levels at this point. Hopefully it’s somewhat clear how the game’s flow is going to work–It starts out pretty straightforward, and slowly gets sick of you. Then it starts to resent you. Then it starts to hate you.
It’s fun as hell to write, by the way.
One Response
Mike
Nice idea with the musical instruments, that’s suuuuuuper important for learning something completely. Like you’re going to know about different materials and how sound works, thats cool. I learned about how meat dries, and now I have an idea of how things dry. Also, for the cell game, (maybe) making it more realistic, by like making it kinda like a 3d osmosis jones will make it more visceral and real. maybe. Yea but it’s gonna take you a while to make anything, just like my cousin who’s an artist, each mosaic takes like a month, depending how big it is. A big project, like on the side of a building took him like 8 months, but his work is…. rigorous and detailed and very thoughtful and carefully crafted. His works are good, old museum art good, like roman vases good. Anyway, yea it’s good that you are making your own instruments because i’m doing the same thing, but with economics. It really helps you understand precisely how the physical world works. It’s nice.