Posted May 26, 2024 by PetricakeGames-IF
Here's the unpopular opinion hill that I will die on: Dragon Age 2 is a good game, actually.
I'm not going to say the complaints against it aren't valid but I will say they don't outweigh what made DA2 special. In a world of sprawling and empty open-world games, spending an entire 25+ hour game in one city, watching it change through the years, seeing the effects of your choices play out in the place you live allows the player to dig into the world in a way that's harder to find. Places have power.
When I read the restrictions of the Locus Jam the place I thought of was the breakroom at my first job. It's been a couple decades since I've had that job and I can still see it so clearly. A strange, inbetween place where I wasn't quite myself--not comfortable enough to be open but in the same space didn't have to fully be my worksona, either. What an odd little waiting room it was.
I didn't capture a sense of the place as much as I'd wanted to with the initial version of this game. The jam was shorter than I realized and I am a perpetual late starter. I'd wanted the room to be more of an active participant/mirror of the narrative.
Instead the focus fell to the emotional beats of the story--which is where I prefer the focus to be. It's a bit rough around the edges currently. It's meant to be an exploration of connection; at how quickly people will absolve themselves of responsibility for another's emotional well-being while also holding others responsible for their own emotional regulation; questioning the security of connections if one focuses entirely on oneself; and the desperate fear I feel that no one cares about me. I think a bit more elegance is needed than what I achieved with Charley but I suspect I'll tackle those themes frequently in my games.
It was a delight to work with ink again. For the first time I played around with some conditionals. The game I wrote is not that complex, but there is some gameplay in Charley and I was proud when things worked out. It was good practice for some of the bigger projects I'm working on.
I've missed writing games and playing interactive fiction. It's nice to return to them.