Why I made this game [spoilers]

This devlog is to explain my reasoning and thoughts when I made this game. I would recomend that you only read it after having actually beaten the game.

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This game was made as a part of the Leeble gamejam 5, in February 2020. 

The theme in this game jam was "What if the friends we made along the way?". When I first looked at this theme I was very confounded. How can this be a theme. Its just a question. And its not really a finished sentence , it seems to wanting to ask something about the friends, but simply stops when it starts to formulate this question. 

The way I interpreted this theme was that, the reason why the sentence is so weird, and why it is a question as a theme is insecurity. This sentence comes from someone who is doubting her friends. It comes from someone who when she meets friendly people needs to ask, "well whjat if these people ....?". This is what I interpreted the theme to be. So I started designing my game to be a puzzle game exploring the concept of insecurity in your friendships. 

So the first problem I had to solve is to get the player to make friends. We can easily represent this with a person going from neutral to smiling. The game then gets divided in to two parts, one part where the palyer makes friends and then the second part where she has to take the consequence of these friendships. Each level having its own consequence adds the insecurity of the player - "What will happen with my friends in the second part.".  First level have friendly friends, who give you goal coins, but it quickly goes bad with friends start to shy away from you, friends who start attacking/aggressively following you.  Then the second to last level has Friends, and people in general who just disapear, leaving you all alone in the end. 

The 4 starting level also have some weird things going on with graphics getting a bit weird, especially at work where the organization is quite weird and walls are quite strange. The start text of each level say "day 1" in weirder and weirder ways. This might be a bit too implicit, but my thought with this is that the 4 first levels are part of someones worrying dreas, which is why it repeats all over and over and over, with different things which the person worries about. Then the last level say "Day 1" perfectly normal where also your friends act very normally and actually talk to you on your way back from work. To emphasize that this is a real day followed by another "real" day the game ends with you getting to "Day 2", implying that "Day 1" was the actual day 1.

This game was very fun to make, and I especially enjoyed making a much more thematic game, which forced me to really think and argue around the theme, as you can see on this devlog. Yes, you are very welcome to disagree with my interpretation on the theme and think that everything I wrote above is super weird, that is fine.

Thanks for playing my game, and special thanks to Supershigi and her community who hosted the game jam.

Ove