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A jam submission

Behind the Hydra's EyesView game page

A wind farm management game
Submitted by adamdjames, DingelFrinkel — 7 hours, 38 minutes before the deadline
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Behind the Hydra's Eyes's itch.io page

Game Title
Behind the Hydra's Eyes

Developer Name
House on the Bailey

Short Promo Blurb
A wind turbine project management sim. Explore the tangled web of renewable energy, dispossession, and greenwashing through the lens of a British middle-manager who aspires only to pay rent and have a meaningful job.

Full Description
202x, England. Forward Green, an NGO whose mission is " to fight climate change with ermergant technology", has started a new project. Lagoon Breeze: Supplying Renewable Energy to Impoverished Communities. Eager, both to help the climate and get a raise, Dave fights for the role of project lead. Successfully.

Play Dave as you navigate the construction of this wind farm: pick a construction site, lead your team, allocate a marketing budget, handle questions from the locals, and keep afloat of your own living expenses. Can you make an impact? Do good? Dare you look, eyes uncovered, at what you bring to the lagoon?

Time to make an impact.

Promo Image(s)
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1QIyo30SzlCOCyM4ci7FERFVPr-N6J7tU?usp=drive_link

Promo Video
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1QIyo30SzlCOCyM4ci7FERFVPr-N6J7tU?usp=drive_link

Artistic Statement / Use of Theme(s)
As changing the story involves tackling myths, we chose to tackle the myth of green development; the myth that the West can continue it’s wanton destruction, looting, and hyper-consumption as long as it shifts from non-renewables to renewables. Our most direct inspiration is the work of Xander Dunlap in supporting those protesting green colonialism, particularly the case study of Oaxaca in ch2 of his book "This System is Killing Us: Land Grabbing, the Green Economy and Ecological Conflict". Our full artistic statement can be downloaded on the game page.

Development Summary
Unfortunately, the main change was a cut caused by our competing commitments. Quarters three and four were removed, with the final scene (your boss unceremoniously firing you) moved from Q4 to Q2. Our artist had to learn pixel art and animation from scratch, while our programmer had to balance a university course and a full time job alongside development. Our full development summary can be downloaded on the game page.

Release Plan
We will continue working on it after a one week break due to life commitments, and expect to take 2-3 weeks to finish. We want to: add in cut sections, almost doubling game length; flesh out introduced mechanics; update various art elements; create a proper start screen; polish all the systems. We're really eager to get this done to potentially submit for the IndieCade steam bundle. Our full release plan can be downloaded on the game page.

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Comments

Submitted

The game was amazingly built and written and brought light to corporate companies exploiting and using "green" solutions as a cover-up. Each email pulled you deeper into the narrative in the story making you feel more and more sympathetic for the characters and situation. The pixel art is really fun and cute, it adds so much personality. 

Submitted (1 edit) (+1)

Hey congrats on your release, it's quite impressive how much you've achieved as a 2-person team with this tight schedule. The writing is compelling, you know your subject and the NPCs had distinctive voices. The visuals are cool too, and congrats especially since it's your first time working in pixel art. You are also bringing to attention something that isn't discussed enough (green-washing in the age of capitalism) in a way that is both entertaining and meaningful. I was happy to have my character lose his job and leave to Mexico lol.

That being said, I got almost stuck at the end of Q1, when I had to choose Dave's lifestyle and savings (it wasn't super clear that I had to reach 0 to move to the next quarter). It reminded me of Papers, Please, and I think it'd be interesting to bring a few more elements here for future developments to add more weight about losing your job potentially and go become an activist (the cost is much higher if you don't have any savings, need to provide for a family, etc.) Just a random thought. You did great, thank you for sharing your game!

Submitted

I really like the atmosphere and immersion this game created. It's a really simple yet effectively presented narrative, and the small choices that I am offered ultimately not being very impactful feels like a great piece of commentary in and of itself, it really felt like being a single cog in a large corporate machine. My favorite part was the mashing keys to type out emails, it felt really fun and was a good change of pace from the rest of the gameplay. I did unfortunately find a bug where trying to brew some tea locked my movement so I had to restart the game.

Submitted

This game has a really unique perspective to renewable energy and the conflicts it can incite between communities versus corporations. The pixel art style was very charming and the animation was very smooth for the most part. I had slight issue reading the text at the very beginning as the longer sentences got cut off on my monitor. Other than that, you found a way to make emails fascinating and would love to see further development of this story and art in the future!

Submitted

This was so so fun! I had a really fun time pretending to write emails by mashing the keyboard. I also love the theme of your overall game and the storytelling was done excellently. The visuals are very nice and the game feels complete. I loved the way you guys approached your issue and simulating an employee at work seems very relatable and appropriate. One issue I had is that the text when interacting with people is a little hard to read but other than that great job! I enjoyed this game a lot.

Submitted

Really funny and cynical take on corporate abuse, and the level of polish and depth of narrative are both very impressive. Two issues I faced were with the aspect ratio (when I made the game full screen, the edges of the game were cut off) and with the controls (at the end of my first month, I couldn't seem to advance forward regardless of which button I pressed).

Developer

Hi Ben! Thank you so much for all the kind words! We are already aware of a few bugs with this version, however in the first day playing in the office, as long as you clear all pending conversations (with an !) you should then be able to interact with the door at the bottom left. If you still don't manage it, many apologies, there is still a fair bit of content afterwards. 

The resolution problem is something i've been struggling with, and honestly 2D Canvas scaling in Unity using both sprites and UI images is at this point maybe beyond me. Either way, the next version we will upload, post jam, will hopefully have better UI scaling, and from now on I'll stick with 3D environments even if I'm doing a 2D game. 

Very thankful for you giving it a play nevertheless!

Submitted (1 edit) (+1)

I haven't gotten a chance to play this until now and I'm really impressed! Mashing any keys to "write" emails feels very fun and engaging. Love that it's tea instead of coffee. I enjoy the humor of the emails and the flow of the game is easy to understand without being boring at all. This is really dope and could educate many of us on the nuances/real world risks of development.

Submitted(+1)

Loved this one from the earlier sprints and still love it!! There's a lot of content here and it feels very natural, and the arguments are nuanced and well-researched. Really encourages role play which I don't always find very easy to get into. The email typing is great. I did reach a point about 4 turns in, I went to make a cup of tea before trying to handle some silly protests (can't do it without a nice brew) , but the dialogue with the kettle never popped up and I couldn't move away from it so unfortunately it crashed it. So maybe some better error handling would have been useful for a 'released' version because there's no way for me to recover my progress. Other than that, really great work!

Developer(+1)

Thanks for taking the time to play, and your kind words!

We've working on a fix for the bug you've found now (commiserations to your playthrough, but thanks for finding it!). There's a few other bugfixes we're also going to roll out as soon as the ratings are over, and also a big story expansion, so hopefully we'll be at a more releasable point soon :)