2D Puzzle Game: əfface (2022 GGJ)

(*中文翻译待更新)

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əfface is a simple 2D puzzle game I collaborated with a temporary team with members from Shenzhen, Chengdu and the US during Golbal Game Jam January 2022. This was my first time participating in a game jam. We finished the game in 24 hours.

Title Screen

In əfface, the player plays as a firefly to chase for ultimate freedom and lights in a beautiful setting. And experiences mixed emotions of sadness, curiosity, and warmness. While encouraging the player to generate a story on their own, we hope them to feel not only the duality of color and sound, but also the duality of time and space thorugh simple player controls.

I made a game flow for this collaboration, and showed the aesthetic style with text annotations (in Chinese) to let members of defferent roles understand their work better. I also arranged the division of work for each team member in spread sheets.

I also learned a lot from this experience, such as how to coordinate the team's arrangement, how to be more flexible in deleting scope based on overall progress, etc. The process of making a game in a game jam is different from an usual game development. Limited by the time constraints and unfamiliar team members, when the most important player experience and core loop/mechanic are set, many auxiliary ideas have to be discarded to serve the core content of the game.

This game was made for Global Game Jam 2022 (January) after all. So I designed several sets of duality relationships as the core, and let the players conceive a story on their own. The duality relationships in the game are:

Black - White
Static - Dynamic
Depression - Freedom
Black and White - Colorfulness
Single Note - Chord
One firefly - Fireflies
Firefly in a jar - Firefly in the wild
Pillar - Broken pillar

Almost every tester (we had people from the jam site we participated in played through it) came up with a story after completing the game based on their own understanding. Most thoughts can be summarized as, "flying freely and playing with companions in a gorgeous scene is just a dream of a lonely firefly trapped in a jar". Some also feel that this game can be the firefly's recollection of its past. The firefly was originally with its companions, but was caught and locked in a jar. I'm glad that players can have their own insights.

Finally, a special thanks to our incredible talented composer Amy! She did a great job with all my requests in music. I was particularly impressed with the clock ticking sounds that she managed to add in our bgm. I was inspired by Null Moon (Silent Hill 2) and Dewdrop (Ender Lilies), where the drums were used as ticking sounds to match the bell tower ringing at the end of the piece, then communicated this idea to Amy. Eventually, in əfface, one piece of music was used during both the tutorial and the ending, but the latter added ticking sounds. I hope this will be used to allow players to experience the possibilities of time and space from the sense of hearing.